The emergence of competition is a defining aspect of human nature and characterizes many important social environments. However, its relationship with how social groups are formed has received little attention. We design an experiment to analyze how individuals' willingness to compete is...

We design a laboratory experiment to study behavior in a multidivisional organization facing a trade-off between coordinating its decisions across the divisions and meeting division-specific needs that are known only to the division managers. The managers communicate their private information...

We investigate fairness preferences in matching mechanisms using a spectator design. Participants choose between the Boston mechanism or the serial dictatorship mechanism (SD) played by others. In our setup, the Boston mechanism generates justified envy, while the strategy-proof SD ensures...

This note uncovers new properties of the von Neumann-Morgenstern solution in weak tournaments and majoritarian games. We propose a new procedure for the construction of choice sets from weak tournaments, based on dynamic stability criteria. The idea is to analyze dynamic versions of the...

We study both theoretically and experimentally the set of Nash equilibria of a classical one-dimensional election game with two candidates. These candidates are interested in power and ideology, but their weights on these two motives are not necessarily identical. Apart from obtaining the well...

We develop a model to study the political economy implications of information gatekeeping, i.e., a policy of granting access only to friendly media outlets and denying access to critical ones. While an incumbent prefers positive bias, granting access improves her re-election probability only if...

We study the informational effectiveness of electoral campaigns. Voters may not think about all political issues and have incomplete information with regard to political positions of candidates. Nevertheless, we show that if candidates are allowed to microtarget voters with messages then...

One of the fundamental problems of the positive theory of income taxation is explaining why the statutory income tax schedules in all industrialized democracies are marginal-rate progressive. While it is commonly believed that this is but a simple consequence of the fact that the number of...

We study both theoretically and experimentally the complete set of Nash equilibria of a classical one-dimensional, majority rule election game with two candidates, who might be interested in power as well as in ideology, but not necessarily in the same way. Apart from obtaining the well known...

Using a laboratory experiment, we investigate whether a variety of behaviors in repeated games are related to an array of individual characteristics that are popular in economics: risk attitude, time preference, trust, trustworthiness, altruism, strategic skills in one-shot matrix games,...