This article explores the use of alternative payment mechanisms to overcome the holdout problem when multiple parcels of land must be acquired to complete a real-estate development project. Purchase offers contingent upon successful land aggregation are compared to combination offers containing...

This article presents a classroom game that allows students to directly experience the welfare improvements that can result from price discrimination. The demonstration uses a very familiar decision-making scenario, campus parking, to introduce the concept of price discrimination as well as...

A classic theory of corporate governance holds that when cash flow is high and investment opportunities scarce, takeover threats reduce managerial self-dealing and encourage dividend payment to owners. I conduct laboratory experiments studying the effect of cash flow on selfdealing and the...

When the value of a product or service is uncertain, outcomes can be inefficient. A market for evaluations can theoretically increase efficiency by voluntarily eliciting an evaluation that would otherwise not be provided. This paper uses a controlled laboratory experiment to test the performance...

If, as Hume argues, property is a self-referring custom of a group of people, then property rights depend on how that group forms and orders itself. In this article we investigate how people construct a convention for property in an experiment in which groups of self-selected individuals can...

This article uses a laboratory experiment to examine the question of whether justice and fairness are different motivational forces in the dictator game. ‘‘Justice’’ and ‘‘fairness’’ are often used interchangeably because their meanings and usages are so closely linked, despite...