Limited attention has been devoted on how (real-life) social networks are elicited and mapped, even less from the viewpoint of mechanism design. This paper surveys the few mechanisms that have been proposed by the experimental literature to this purpose. These mechanisms differ in their...

While it is well-established in the literature that obese people are discriminated against in the working environment, little is known about their own actual behavior. Our experimental setting investigates whether these potentially discriminated people respond in a different way when faced with...

This paper analyzes if men and women are expected to behave dif- ferently regarding altruism. Since the dictator game provides the most suitable design for studying altruism and generosity in the lab setting, we use a modi.ed version to study the beliefs involved in the game. Our results are...

This study explores how a self-fulfilling prophecy can solve a social dilemma. We ran two experimental treatments, baseline and automata. Both consisted of a finitely repeated public goods game with a surprise restart. In the automata treatment it was announced that there might be automata...

The top-two primary is the new primary system passed in several states of the US that creates a single ballot in which the top two vote getters pass to the general election. Primary elections induce a sequential game with three stages: the candidate-entry stage, the primary election stage, and...

A jury has to choose the winner of a contest. There exists a deserving winner, whose identity is common knowledge among the jurors, but not known by the planner. Jurors may be biased in favor (friend) or against (enemy) some contestants. We study conditions on the confi?guration of the jury so...

This paper proposes a theory of media silence. The argument is that news organizations have the power to raise public concern and so affect the probability that there is ex-post verification of the true state of the world. Built on the literature of career concerns, we consider a newspaper that...

Parliamentary elections to the Basque Autonomous Community have a stable multi-party system that regularly produces long-lived minority and coalition governments. More amazing still, this stable party system arises in the context of a complex social and political setting in which the society...

We present a framework to analyze the relative importance of issues for the electorate. We distinguish two concepts -- issue salience and issue divisiveness -- and present those in the context of the multidimensional spatial model. Issue salience, which is widely studied in empirical and...

We propose a model in which different types of journalists have superior information to a newspaper's editor. Journalists compete for having their report published, but when writing their reports, they are uncertain about the preferences of the editor. We analyze the effects of competition and...