Do people care about intentions? Good intentions often do not produce good results when a person tries to do something nice for someone else. In this paper, we ask under what circumstances do people pay attention to outcomes and under what circumstances do they focus on intentions. While the...

If, as has been widely suggested, internal labor markets are declining and a new employment contract with reduced employer-employee commitment is emerging, the criteria by which employees judge layoffs as fair or unfair may be changing. This paper presents findings relevant to that question,...

If, as has been widely suggested, internal labor markets are declining and a new employment contract with reduced employer-employee commitment is emerging, the criteria by which employees judge layoffs as fair or unfair may be changing. This paper presents findings relevant to that question,...

Do people care about intentions - even when good intentions do not produce good results? In our experiments we find that rates of punishment and reward react strongly to intentions (the wage a firm decides to pay) and more modestly to distributional outcomes (the higher or lower wage actually...

This book explores this apparent change in the employment contract from a new perspective. Whereas earlier studies in this area focused on the rigidities in the quantity side of the employment relationship, e.g., changes in job tenure and rates of displacement, the authors focus on the price...

This paper investigates whether information about fairness types can be useful in lowering dispute costs and enhancing bargaining efficiency. An experiment was conducted in which subjects were first screened using a dictator game, with the allocations chosen used to separate participants into...

In experiments with two-person sequential games we analyze whether responses to favorable and unfavorable actions depend on the elicitation procedure. In our “hot” treatment the second player responds to the first player’s observed action while in our “cold” treatment we follow the...

While markets are often decentralized, in many other cases agents in one role can only negotiate with a proper subset of the agents in the complementary role. There may be proximity issues or restricted communication flows. For example, information may be transmitted only through word-of-mouth,...