The Political Coase Theorem (PCT) states that, in the absence of transaction costs, agents should agree to implement efficient policies regardless of the distribution of bargaining power among them. This paper uses a laboratory experiment to explore how commitment problems undermine the validity...

In this experiment I study a novel three-player ultimatum game in which two proposers with unequal amounts of money simultaneously submit offers to one responder, who may accept at most one offer. I compare the predictions of inequity aversion, advantage seeking, and self-interest. Unlike...

We present evidence from an experiment in which groups select a leader to compete against the leaders of other groups in a real-effort task that they have all performed in the past. We find that women are selected much less often as leaders than is suggested by their individual past performance....

We investigate the intrinsic motivation of individuals to report, and thereby sanction, fellow group members who lie for personal gain. We further explore the changes in lying and reporting behavior that result from giving individuals a say in who joins their group. We find that enough...

We explore bargaining, using ultimatum games, when one party, the proposer, possesses private information about the pie size and can either misrepresent this information through untruthful statements (explicit deception) or through information-revealing actions (implicit deception). Our study is...

We demonstrate that receiver credulity can be understood through a false consensus effect: the likelihood with which individuals believe messages about the behavior of others can be explained by their own behavioral tendencies in a comparable situation. In a laboratory experiment, subjects play...

We introduce a new method for measuring the decision to lie in experiments. In the game, the decision to lie increases own payment independent of the counterpart's decision, but potentially at a cost for the counterpart. We identify at the individual level the decision to lie, and measure how...

According to the Greek philosopher Plato “[…] if anyone at all is to have the privilege of lying the rulers of the State […] may be allowed to lie for the public good” (The Royal Lie). To investigate whether The Royal Lie may foster cooperation in public goods provision we experimentally...

We compare experimentally the revealed distributional preferences of individuals and teams in allocation tasks. We find that teams are significantly more benevolent than individuals in the domain of disadvantageous inequality while the benevolence in the domain of advantageous inequality is...

While scholars and pundits alike have expressed concern regarding the increasingly “tribal” nature of political identities, there has been little analysis of how this social polarization impacts political selection. In this paper, we incorporate social identity into a principal-agent model...