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 construct a simple three person trust game with one trustor and two trustees. The trustor has the possibility to either trust both trustees or none, while the trustees make their decisions either sequentially or simultaneously, depending on the treatment. When trustees play sequentially,...

Abundant evidence suggests that high levels of contributions to public goods can be sustained through self-governed monitoring and sanctions. This experimental study investigates the effectiveness of decentralized sanctioning institutions where punishment opportunities are restricted to agents...

We experimentally test the social motives behind individual participation in intergroup conflict by manipulating the framing and symmetry of conflict. We find that behavior in conflict depends on whether one is harmed by actions perpetrated by the out-group, but not on one’s own influence on...

Controlling employees can have severe consequences in situations that are not fully contractible. However, the perception of control may be contingent on the nature of the relationship between principal and agent. We, therefore, propose a principal-agent model of control that takes into account...

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 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...

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...