Women can bear own children or adopt them. Extending economic theories of fertility, we provide a first theoretical treatment of the demand for adoption. We show that the propensity to adopt a child increases in the degree of own altruism, infertility, relatedness to the child, costs of own...

In belligerent countries, male-to-female sex ratios at birth increased during and shortly after the two world wars. These rises still defy explanation. Several causes have been suggested (but not tested) in the literature. Many of these causes are proximate in nature, reflecting behavioral...

Marriage regimes exist in many guises and forms. Economists have studied monogamy and polygyny, the two most commonly encountered types, and pointed to various benefits that can explain why and which individuals form conjugal unions in each regime. However, many of these same benefits should...

The use of screening contracts is a common approach to solve supply chain coordination problems under asymmetric information. One major assumption in this context is that subjects will rather use their private information strategically than to reveal them truthfully, if they do not get any...

The design of markets has become a major issue due to the capability of online operators to implement almost any set of market rules overnight. With this study we contribute to the literature of market design by presenting a theoretical and experimental analysis of sudden termination auctions....

Many laboratory experiments show that people are often altruistic or care for fairness. We present data that reveal a darker side of human nature. We introduce the joy-of-destruction game. Two players each receive an endowment and simultaneously decide on how much of the other player’s...

Virtual communities like Second Life represent an economic factor with increasing potential, but may induce behavior that deviates from real world experience. We introduce a new experimental design that is based on the trust game (Berg, Dickhaut, and McCabe 1995), but eliminates the problem of...

We use a laboratory experiment to study the extent to which investors’ choices are affected by limited loss deduction in income taxation. We first compare investment behavior in the no tax baseline to a tax control setting, in which the income from investments is taxed. We find that investors...

Based on a serial supply chain model with 2-periods and price-sensitive demand, we present the first experimental test of the effect of strategic inventories on supply chain performance. In theory, if holding costs are low enough, the buyer builds up a strategic inventory (even if no operational...