This paper considers the endogenous formation of an institution to provide a public good. If the institution governs only its members, players have an incentive to free ride on the institution formation of others and the social dilemma is simply shifted to a higher level. Addressing this...

This paper considers the eff ects of a two-period interaction on the decision of a principal to delegate authority to a potentially biased but better informed agent. Compared to the (repeated) one-period case, the agent's first period actions may also signal his type which in turn impacts wages...

This paper investigates the effectiveness of two instruments designed to defer termination in the centipede game: an insurance against termination by the opponent, and an option to offer the opponent a bonus for not terminating the game. The rational prediction in both cases is passing until...

This paper suggests a potential rationale for the recent empirical finding that overconfident agents tend to self-select into more competitive environments (e.g. Dohmen and Falk, 2006). In particular, it shows that moderate overconfidence in a contest can improve the agent's performance relative...

This paper reports data from an ultimatum mini-game in which responders first had to choose whether or not to participate. Participation was costly, but the participation cost was smaller than the minimum payoff that a responder could guarantee himself in the ultimatum game. Compared to a...

This paper considers the effects of a two-period interaction on the decision of a principal to delegate authority to a potentially biased but better informed agent. Compared to the (repeated) one-period case, the agent's first period actions may also signal his type which in turn impacts wages...

Over the last decades, research in behavioural economics has demonstrated that individual welfare (utility), as relevant for economic decision making, depends not only on absolut but also on distributional aspects. Moreover, evidence is gathering that something similar holds for aggregate...

Allowing for a free choice of the recipient's gender in a dictator game (N = 508), we find that women show a substantial gender biased towards females. Adding a charity recipient to the possible choices, the charity becomes the primary recipient and overall transfers increase. Yet, conditioning...

Integrating individual inequity aversion into a utilitarian social welfare function, we derive a simple welfare measure which comprises both GDP and income inequality as measured by the Gini-index. The provided theoretical link between inequity aversion (popular in behavioural microeconomics)...