We study dynamic committee bargaining over an infinite horizon with discounting. In each period a committee proposal is generated by a random recognition rule, the committee chooses between the proposal and a status quo by majority rule, and the voting outcome in period t becomes the status quo...

We interpret the psychology literature on social identity and examine its implications in a population partially composed of such agents. We model a population of agents from two exogenous and well defined social groups. Agents are randomly matched to play a reduced form bargaining game. We show...

We analyze the effects of asymmetric information concerning the size of a pie on proposer behavior in three different bargaining situations: the ultimatum game, the Yes-No-game and the dictator game. Our data show that (a) irrespective of the information condition, proposer generosity increases...

The measurement of social norms plays a pivotal role in many social sciences. While economists predominantly conduct experiments, sociologists rather employ (factorial) surveys. Both methods, however, suffer from distinct weaknesses. Experiments, on the one hand, often fall short in the...

Many economic experiments are run in the laboratory with students as participants. In this paper we use a newspaper experiment to learn more about external validity of lab research. Our workhorse is the Yes-No game. Unlike in ultimatum games responders of the Yes-No games do not know the...

Norms play an important role in establishing social order. The current literature focuses on the emergence, maintenance and impact of norms with regard to coordination and cooperation. However, the issue of norm-related conflict deserves more attention. We develop a general theory of normative...

Many real-life applications of house allocation problems are dynamic. For example, in the case of on-campus housing for college students, each year freshmen apply to move in and graduating seniors leave. Each student stays on campus for a few years only. A student is a newcomer in the beginning...

We model the bargaining process of parents over custody at the time of divorce. First we assume an institutional setting where only sole custody is available. In a second step we reform this institutional setting and introduce the possibility of joint custody. We show that some parents, who...

We analyze the role of damage clauses in labor contracts using a model in which a worker may want to terminate his current employment relationship and work for another firm. We show that the initial parties to a contract have an incentive to stipulate excessive damage clauses, which leads to ex...

This paper reports results from a unique two-stage experiment designed to examine the spillover effects of optimism and pessimism. In stage 1, we induce optimism or pessimism onto subjects by randomly assigning a high or low piece rate for performing a cognitive task. We find that participants...