More often than not production processes are the joint endeavor of people having different abilities and productivities. Such production processes and the associated surplus production are often not fully transparent in the sense that the relative contributions of involved agents are blurred;...

Policies and explicit private incentives designed for self-regarding individuals sometimes are less effective or even counterproductive when they diminish altruism, ethical norms and other social preferences. Evidence from 51 experimental studies indicates that this crowding out effect is...

International climate negotiations take place in a setting where uncertainties regarding the impacts of climate change are very large. In this paper, we examine the influence of increasing the probability and impact of large climate change damages, also known as the ‘fat tail’, on the...

Government or company decisions on whom to hire are mostly delegated to politicians, public sector officials or human resources and procurement managers. Due to anti-corruption laws, agents cannot sell contracts or positions that they are delegated to decide upon. Even if bribing is ruled out,...

The industrialization process of a country is often plagued by a failure to coordinate investment decisions. Using the Global Games approach we can solve this coordination problem and eliminate the problem of multiple equilibria. We show how appropriate information provision enhances efficiency....

In a Case Law regime Courts have more flexibility than in a Statute Law regime. Since Statutes are inevitably incomplete, this confers an advantage to the Statute Law regime over the Case Law one. However, all Courts rule ex-post, after most economic decisions are already taken. Therefore, the...

We define an indirect evolutionary approach formally and apply it to (Tullock) contests. While it is known (Leininger, 2003) that the direct evolutionary approach in the form of finite population ESS (Schaffer, 1988) yields more aggressive behavior than in Nash equilibrium, it is now shown that...

We study compliance dynamics generated by a large set of behavioral rules describing social interaction in a population of agents facing an enforcement authority. When the authority adjusts the auditing probability every period, cycling in cheating-auditing occurs: Intensive monitoring induces...

Legal provisions that protect politicians from arrest and prosecution exist throughout much of the modern democratic world. Why, and with what effects, do societies choose to place their politicians above the law? We examine the institution of immunity both theoretically and empirically. Our...

For the first time we develop a time series of tax evasion (in % of official GDP) for 38 OECD countries over the period 1999 to 2010 based on MIMIC model estimations of the shadow economy. Considering indirect taxation and self-employment as the driving forces of tax evasion, we observe a...