Numerous studies suggest that communication may be a universal means to mitigate collective action problems. In this study, we challenge this view and show that the communication structure crucially determines whether communication mitigates or intensifies the problem of collective action. We...

This paper surveys the recent literature on the political economy of the formation of international environmental agreements. The survey covers theoretical modelling approaches and empirical studies including experimental work. Central to our survey is the question how the political process...

This paper experimentally investigates the effect of limits on campaign spending and outcome in an electoral contest where two candidates, an incumbent and a challenger, compete for office in terms of the amount of campaign expenditure. The candidates are asymmetric only in that the incumbent...

Absentmindedness is a special case of imperfect recall which according to Piccione and Rubinstein (1997a) leads to time inconsistencies. Aumann, Hart and Perry (1997a) question their argument and show how dynamic inconsistencies can be resolved. The present paper explores this issue from a...

This article defines in a precise manner three different mechanisms to achieve impartiality in distributive justice and studies them experimentally. We consider a first-person procedure, the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, and two third-party procedures, the impartial spectator and the ideal...

We report on an experiment using video technology to manipulate pre-play communication protocols in the lab and to study purely social effects of communication on donations and discrimination between potential receivers. The experimental design eliminates strategic factors by allowing two...

Tournaments represent an increasingly important component of organizational compensation systems. While prior research focused on fixed-prize tournaments, i.e., on tournaments where the prize or prize sum to be awarded is set in advance, we introduce a new type of tournament into the literature:...

Economists have been theorizing that other-regarding preferences influence decision making. Yet, what are the corresponding psychological mechanisms that inform these preferences in laboratory games? Empathy and Theory of Mind (ToM) are dispositions considered to be essential in social...

Almost all international environmental agreements include a minimum participation rule. Under such a rule an agreement becomes legally binding if and only if a certain threshold in terms of membership or contribution is reached. We analyze a cartel game with open membership and heterogeneous...

In this paper, we reexamine Eliaz's results (2002) of fault tolerant implementation on one hand and we extend theorems 1 and 2 of Doghmi and Ziad (2008a) to bounded rationality environments, on the other. We identify weak versions of the k-no veto power condition, in conjunction with unanimity...