Trust that suppliers and buyers will keep their word is a necessary ingredient to a well functioning marketplace. Nowhere is the issue trickier than for electronic markets, where transactions tend to be geographically diffuse and anonymous, putting them out of the reach of the legal safeguards...

Online reputation - "feedback" - mechanisms aim to mitigate the moral hazard problems associated with spatially distant exchange among strangers by providing traders with the type of information available in small groups, where members are frequently involved in one another's dealings. We...

Voting is a natural context to investigate how democratic societies balance claims of economic efficiency against claims of distributive equity. We examine data from a series of simple experimental voting games; in each, voters are confronted with two distributional policies, one that promotes...

In experimental bargaining with incomplete information, we vary the information distribution (symmetric and asymmetric), the direction of electronic pre-play communication (no, one-way, and two-way), and the electronic communication medium (email and video) Bargaining out-comes are influenced by...

Many bidders in eBay employ bidding strategies that involve late bids, incremental bids, or both. Based on field evidence, we discuss the manner in which late bids are caused both by sophisticated, strategic reasoning and by irrationality and inexperience, the interaction of late bidding and...

Retributive responses do play a role in human behavior. Whether they are primarily triggered by supposed intentions or by observed consequences of actions is an important question. It can be addressed by experimental studies of retributive responses in situations in which the individual actor...

Spieltheoretische Überlegungen zeigen, dass Reputationsmechanismen, wie sie auf Internet-Marktplattformen zur Anwendung kommen, prinzipiell geeignet sind, Handel in großen anonymen Märkten zu erleichtern. Dies gilt selbst dann, wenn die Marktteilnehmer ihre Identität jederzeit und kostenlos...