We study the effect of voting when insiders’ public goods provision may affect passive outsiders. Without voting insiders’ contributions do not differ, regardless of whether outsiders are positively or negatively affected or even unaffected. Voting on the recommended contribution level...

According to Adam Smith (1790), human selfishness can be restrained by introspection. We test the effect of introspection on people’s willingness to cooperate in a public good game. Drawing on the concept of identity utility (George A. Akerlof and Rachel E. Kranton, 2000), we show...

Both in the US and in Europe, antitrust authorities prohibit merger not only if the merged entity, in and of itself, is no longer sufficiently controlled by competition. The authorities also intervene if, post merger, the market structure has changed such that "tacit collusion" or "coordinated...

Punishees regularly ask for justification. But is justification also effective? To answer this question under controlled conditions, we have conducted a public goods experiment with central punishment. The authority is neutral – she does not benefit from contributions to the public good....

Antitrust authorities all over the world are concerned if a particularly aggressive competitor, a "maverick", is bought out of the market. Yet there is a lack of theoretical justification. One plausible determinant of acting as a maverick is behavioral: the maverick derives utility from acting...

In this paper, we analyze the link between effort and preferences for redistribution. If individ-uals hold standard preferences, those with higher ability exert more effort. Higher effort leads to a higher income. Individuals with a higher income oppose redistribution. Yet, under non-standard...

Empirically, the commons are not as tragic as standard theory predicts. The predominant explanation for this finding is conditional cooperation. Yet many real life situations involve insiders, who are directly affected by a dilemma, and outsiders, who may be harmed if the insiders overcome the...

Customary law has been criticized from very different angles. Rational choice theorists claim that what looks like custom is nothing but self-interest. Positivists doubt that anything beyond consent assumes the force of law. In this paper, we adopt an experimental approach to test these claims....

Triggered by the concentration process in the electricity and gas markets, the land of Hesse proposes to give the German cartel office power to divest dominant firms or oligopolies if this is necessary to restore competition. The paper shows that the reform would be in line with constitutional...

Jury members do not normally have the privilege of a complete, unbiased picture of the case. To make the best of patently incomplete evidence, they cannot but at least partially rely on their intuition. We provide evidence for this claim based on self-report data as well as more subtle measures...