We propose a spatial competition model to study banks’ strategic responses to the asymmetric Spanish geographic deregulation process. We find that once the geographic deregulation process finishes, inter-regional mergers between savings banks are optimal whenever the economies of scale...

type="main" xml:id="sjpe12037-abs-0001" <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>This study discusses informal hiring in terms of a standard principal–agent model. We have developed an adverse selection model of the labour market where effort is not contractible and employers have the opportunity to use informal search...</p>

We study the effect of blind punishment in a team production experiment, in which subjects choose non-observable effort levels. In this setting, a random exclusion mechanism is introduced, linked to the normalized group performance (R, from 0 to 1). Every round, each subject is non-excluded from...

This paper considers learning rules for environments in which little prior and feedback information is available to the decision maker. Two properties of such learning rules are studied: absolute expediency and monotonicity. Both require that some aspect of the decision maker's performance...

In this paper we focus on inefficient product quality arising from a free-riding problem in agricultural cooperatives. Individual incentives are not aligned with group gains in cooperatives because individual members bear the costs of offering higher qualities, whereas the benefits from these...

Using the experimental sessions of Goeree and Holt (2005), we show that step thinking fits the long-run outcome of minimum-effort and median-effort games surprisingly well for all values of the cost parameter. In the latter, the predicted discontinuous behaviour of step thinking accommodates the...

We experimentally analyse simultaneous behaviour in a contest game and a public good game, whose endowment is shared. Competition for resources (i) almost eliminates overbidding, without affecting public good contributions and (ii) almost eliminates the behavioural spillovers between the games.