Traditionally, the virtue of democratic elections has been seen in their role as means of screening and sanctioning shirking public officials. This paper proposes a novel rationale for elections and political campaigns considering that candidates incur psychological costs of lying, in particular...

We study finitely repeated 2 / 2 normal form games, where players have incomplete information about their opponents’ payoffs. In a laboratory experiment we investigate whether players (a) learn the game they are playing, (b) learn to predict the behavior of their opponent, and (c) learn to...

This paper shows that reciprocity has powerful implications for many economic domains. It is an important determinant in the enforcement of contracts and social norms and enhances the possibilities of collective action greatly. Reciprocity may render the provision of explicit incentive...

In this paper we study experimentally four remedies to overcome inefficiencies that arise from the incompleteness of contracts. These remedies are reciprocity, repeated game effects, social embeddedness, and incentive contracts. In our baseline treatment we find that reciprocity is a powerful...

In this chapter we provide a selective survey of experiments to investigate the potential of social motivations in explaining labour market phenomena. We argue that laboratory experiments are a useful instrument to explore issues in labour market theory and personnel economics. Our starting...

We conducted an experiment to describe how social learners use information about the relation between payoffs and behavior. Players chose between two technologies repeatedly. Payoffs were random, but one technology was better because its expected payoff was higher. Players were divided into two...

Experimental games turned out to be remarkably productive tools for examining the nature of social preferences and social norms. This paper describes the methods and tools of experimental game theory and provides a selection of games that have been useful. We also discuss the role of...

In this paper we show that a simple model of reciprocal preferences explains major experimental regularities of common pool resource (CPR) experiments. The evidence indicates that in standard CPR games without communication and without sanctioning possibilities inefficient excess appropriation...

We design a laboratory experiment to identify causal performance effects of top-down communication between managers and their subordinates. Our focus lies on communication that resolves uncertainty about the work environment but does not provide task-specific knowledge. Recent articles in the...