Our study concerns bargaining behavior in situations where one party is in a stronger position than the other. We investigate both the tradeoff the favored party makes between pursuing his strategic advantage and giving weight to other players' concern for fairness, and the tradeoff the...

People can become less cooperative when threatened with sanctions, and researchers have pointed to both 'intentions' and incentives as sources of this effect. This paper reports data from a novel experimental design aimed at determining the relative importance of intentions and incentives in...

Principals can attempt to get agents to perform certain actions preferable to the principal by using ex post}punishments and rewards to align incentives. Field data is mixed on whether, and to what extent, such informal incentive contracting (paradoxically) crowds out efficient solutions to the...

We explore whether natural human competitiveness can be exploited to stimulate charitable giving in a controlled laboratory experiment involving three different treatments of a sequential ``dictator game.'' Without disclosing the actual amounts given and kept, in each period players are publicly...

Some of the most fundamental questions concerning our evolutionary origins, our social relations, and the organization of society are centred around issues of altruism and selfishness. Experimental evidence indicates that human altruism is a powerful force and is unique in the animal world....

We examine the characteristics and relative strength of third-party sanctions in a series of experiments. We hypothesize that egalitarian distribution norms and cooperation norms apply in our experiments, and that third parties, whose economic payoff is unaffected by the norm violation, may be...

This paper uses the data gained from an income categorization experiment for five shapes of income distributions to investigate background context effects, relative deprivation, range-frequency theory to explain back-ground context effects,individual income satisfaction versus aggregate...

We perform a further experiment to check the robustness of the main result in Rey Biel (2005) to sequential play. We find that Equilibrium predictions work even better when the same games are played sequentially: 85% of first movers choose the Equilibrium strategy and 85% of second movers best...