A government that regularly procures the services of construction companies wants to minimize its costs. The instrument it can use is the level of information feedback given to the firms in the market. Theoretically, the competition between firms is supposed to drive prices to the lowest...

We investigate experimentally how the share of experienced traders in doubleauction asset markets affects trading, in particular the occurrence of bubble-crash pricing patterns. In each session, six subjects trade in three successive market rounds and gain experience. In a fourth round,...

Leniency clauses, offering cartelists legal immunity if they blow the whistle on each other, is a recent anti-trust innovation. The authorities wish to thwart cartels and promote competition. This effect is not evident, however; whistle-blowing may enforce trust and collusion by providing a tool...

This paper tests the insiders' dilemma hypothesis in a laboratory experiment. The insiders' dilemma means that a profitable merger does not occur, because it is even more profitable for each firm to unilaterally stand as an outsider (Kamien and Zang, 1990 and 1993). The experimental data...

A potential source of instability of many economic models is that agents have little incentive to stick with the equilibrium. We show experimentally that this may matter with price competition. The control variable is a price floor, which increases the cost of deviating from equilibrium....

We look at gender differences among adolescents in Sweden in preferences for competition, altruism and risk. For competitiveness, we explore two different tasks that differ in associated stereotypes. We find no gender difference in competitiveness when comparing performance under competition to...

This paper compares cooperation among Columbian and Swedish children aged 9-12. We illustrate the dynamics of the prisoner’s dilemma in a new task that is easily understood by children and performed during a physical education class. We find some evidence that children cooperate more in Sweden...

We explore gender differences in preferences for competition and risk among children aged 9-12 in Colombia and Sweden, two countries differing in gender equality according to macro indices. We include four types of tasks that vary in gender stereotyping when looking at competitiveness: running,...