We present an experiment where two players bargain with a third player. They can bargain either separately or form a joint venture to bargain collectively. Our theoretical benchmark solution predicts decentralized bargaining, as only one player has an interest in forming a joint venture....

Systematic experiments with distribution games (for a survey, see Roth, 1995) have shown that participants are strongly motivated by fairness and efficiency considerations. This evidence, however, results mainly from experimental designs asking directly for sharing monetary rewards. But even...

There is robust field data showing that a frequent and successful way of looking for a job is via the intermediation of friends and relatives. Here we want to test this experimentally. Participants first play a simple public goods game with two interaction partners ('friends'), and share...

Contrary to communitarian market criticism institutions relying on money and bidding can strengthen faculties of ‘self-governance’. Securing procedurally egalitarian bidding on the basis of declared monetary evaluations guarantees that all realized changes of a status quo are in an...

Applying an indirect evolutionary approach with endogenous preference formation, we show that a legal system can induce players to reward trust even if material incentives dictate to exploit trust. By analyzing the crowding out or crowding in of trustworthiness implied by various verdict rules,...

Two traditional assumptions in neo-classical economics have been material self-interest and (commonly known) decision rationality. Since there is ample contradictory empirical evidence, many recent attempts have been made to remodel the situation so that rational behavior is more in line with...

We study experimentally how taxpayers choose between two tax regimes to fund a public good. The first-best tax regime imposes a general, distorsion-free income tax. However, this tax cannot be enforced. The second-best alternative supplements the income tax by a specific commodity tax. This tax...