There is widespread concern among regulators that favoring suppliers with good past performance, a standard practice in private procurement, may hinder entry by new firms in public procurement markets. In this paper we report results from a laboratory experiment exploring the relationship...

While social relationships play an important role for individuals to cope with missing market institutions, they also limit individuals’ range of trading partners. This paper aims at under-standing the determinants of trust at various social distances when information asymmetries are present....

We present an experiment in which extrinsic information (signals) may generate sunspot equilibria. The underlying coordination game has a unique symmetric non-sunspot equilibrium, which is also risk-dominant. Other equilibria can be ordered according to risk dominance. We introduce salient but...