In an experiment designed to test for expressive voting, Tyran (JPubEc 2004) found a strong positive correlation between the participants’ approval for a proposal to donate money for charity and their expected approval rate for fellow voters. This phenomenon can be due to bandwagon voting or a...

We present an economic experiment on the impact of social information on voter behaviour and find strong support for bandwagon behaviour in voting decisions. In total, 418 subjects participated in the experiment. Bandwagon behaviour is found among both male and female subjects.

Improving child care and pre-school education is one of the challenging duties of public authorities in Germany. Given the public resources spent on nursery schools, the quantity as well as the quality of early childhood education in Germany is comparatively low. We think that inefficiency is...

Der schleppende quantitative und qualitative Ausbau der Kindertagesbetreuung in Deutschland wird von uns als Anlass genommen, die gegenwärtige Finanzierungsstruktur und deren Anreize für die Marktteilnehmer im Bereich Kindertagesbetreuung zu untersuchen. Dazu wird die politische Fokussierung...

A country’s production possibility frontier or PPF is defined as the boundary of its economy’s production set in the net output space for a given technology and fixed quantities of primary factors of production. In general equilibrium theory, exogenous changes in technology or primary-factor...

Pay What You Want (PWYW) pricing has received considerable attention recently. Empirical studies show that if PWYW pricing is implemented, in a number of cases consumers do not behave selfishly and that some producers are able to use PWYW for increasing turnover and profits respectively. In this...

Sugden (2000) offers an answer to the question of how unrealistic models can be used to explain real-world phenomena: by considering a set of unrealistic models, one may conclude that a result common to these models also holds for a realistic model that, however, is too complex to be analyzed,...

It is often conjectured that participatory decision making may increase acceptance even of unfavorable decisions. The present paper tests this conjecture in a three-person power-to-take game. Two takers decide which fraction of the responder's endowment to transfer to themselves; the responder...

Using a simple OLG model where the research output of one generation provides inputs for the next, the paper explains how quality standards can become established in scientific competition. Researchers seek status, which they get if their results are used by the next generation. Quality is...

Theories of industrial organization (IO) are tested in the laboratory more and more often. The example we consider throughout the paper is oligopoly theory, specifically, the Cournot and the Stackelberg model of duopolistic quantity competition with homogeneous products. These models have often...