We offer a tractable model of tough negotiations and delayed agreement. The setting is an infinite horizon bilateral bargaining game in which negotiators can make strategic commitments to durable offers. Commitments decay stochastically, but uncommitted negotiators can make new commitments. The...

I analyze how informal agreements can be sustained by moral emotions with regard to a large class of two-player games. Specifically, I assume that people feel guilty if they breach an agreement and that the guilt increases according to the degree of the harm inflicted on the other. A central...

In an otherwise neutrally described Prisonersʼ dilemma experiment, we document that behavior is more likely to be cooperative when the game is called the Community Game than when it is called the Stock Market Game. However, the difference vanishes when only one of the subjects is in control of...

Guilt averse individuals experience a utility loss if they believe they let someone down. For example, generosity depends on what the donor believes that the recipient expects to receive. We measure guilt aversion in three separate experiments: a dictator game experiment, a complete information...