Similar to welfare economics where with(out) interpersonal comparisons one defines unique (set-valued) welfare (Pareto) optima, we present a framework for one-person decision making where with(out) a prior probability distribution individual optimality prescribes usually a unique (set of)...

Unlike previous attempts to implement cooperation in a prisoners' dilemma game with an infinite horizon in the laboratory, we focus on extended prisoners' dilemma games in which a second (pure strategy) equilibrium allows for voluntary cooperation in all but the last round. Our four main...

One may hope to capture the behavioral and emotional effects of downsizing the laborforce in rather abstract settings as an ultimatum game (see Fischer et al. (2008)), or try to explore downsizing in its more natural principalagent scenario with a labor market background. We pursue the latter...

During the last three decades the ascent of behavioral economics clearly helped to bring down artificial disciplinary boundaries between psychology and economics. Noting that behavioral economics seems still under the spell of the rational choice tradition and, indirectly, of behaviorism we...

We study interaction effects between intra-firm conflicts and interfirm competition on a duopolistic market with seller firms employing one or more agents and implementing tournament incentives. We show that inter-firm competition leads to higher incentive intensity, higher efforts and output...

Though the social choice of social institutions or social results is impossible there is, strictly speaking, no social choice individual evaluations of social institutions or results trivially are possible. Such individual evaluations can be deemed liberal either because they emphasize political...

In two-person generosity games the proposer's agreement payoff is exogenously given whereas that of the responder is endogenously determined by the proposer's choice of the pie size. Earlier results for two-person generosity games show that participants seem to care more for efficiency than for...

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...

Although one may hope to achieve equality of stated profits without enforcing it, one may not trust in such voluntary equality seeking and rather try to impose rules (of bidding) guaranteeing it. Our axiomatic approach is based on envy-free net trades according to bids which, together with the...

Most research in economics models agents somehow motivated by outcomes. Here, we model agents motivated by procedures instead, where procedures are defined independently of an outcome. To that end, we design procedures which yield the same expected outcomes or carry the same information on...