Government or company decisions on whom to hire or whom to give a contract are mostly delegated to politicians, public sector officials or human resource and procurement managers. Due to anti-corruption laws, agents cannot sell contracts that they are delegated to decide upon. Even if bribing is...

The paper studies theoretically how the optimal contract in the hidden-action moral-hazard model is affected when an agent feels bad when not reaching a target effort set in the contract. In equilibrium, the agent's effort falls short of the target, inducing guilt, which must be compensated by a...

In this article, the authors measure experienced guilt in a prisoner's-dilemma experiment with preplay communication. The authors find that feelings of guilt only arise in the case of unilateral defection and that they are stronger when players have mutually agreed to cooperate. The authors also...

I analyze how informal agreements can be sustained by moral emotions with regard to a large class of two-player games. Specifically, I assume that people feel guilty if they breach an agreement and that the guilt increases according to the degree of the harm inflicted on the other. A central...

The existing literature acknowledges that a mismatch between the experimenter’s and the subjects’ models of an experimental task can adversely affect the interpretation of data from laboratory experiments. We primarily focus on experiments designed to test a hypothesis by comparing behavior...

We offer a tractable model of tough negotiations and delayed agreement. The setting is an infinite horizon bilateral bargaining game in which negotiators can make strategic commitments to durable offers. Commitments decay stochastically, but uncommitted negotiators can make new commitments. The...

Recent literature has established a link between the fully cursed equilibrium and the analogy-based expectation equilibrium. In this note, even the partially cursed equilibrium is shown to correspond to an analogy-based expectation equilibrium.