Taking the initiative is a crucial element of leadership and an important asset for many jobs. We assess leadership in a game in which it emerges spontaneously since people have a non-obvious possibility to take the initiative. Combining this game with small experimental games and...

This paper presents experimental evidence that contributions to a public good can be path-dependent for a limited time span. We study a repeated linear public-good game with punishment opportunities. Our data shows that subjects who had experienced a higher marginal return on public-good...

This paper presents experimental evidence that tax compliance is path dependent. We show that individuals faced with the same current tax enforcement parameters, will nevertheless choose different compliance if they have faced different tax enforcement parameters in the past. This finding has...

We investigate the role of incentives set by a parent firm for competition among its subsidiaries. In a Cournot experiment four subsidiaries of the same parent operate in the same market. Parents earn a specific share of the joint profit and can choose how to distribute the remaining surplus (or...

This paper tests two basic assumptions underlying court made or statutory provisions prohibiting predatory pricing. Such prohibitions are usually based on the economic grounds that monopolistic pricing is likely to occur in the long run, causing harm to competition and consumers. The first...

This exploratory note presents experimental evidence on how the design of law enforcement impacts legal compliance and detection avoidance. The experiment varies the enforcer's identity and the use of fine revenue. The data show that the level of detection avoidance is indeed influenced by the...

Two pairs of two participants each interact repeatedly in two structurally independent but informationally linked Prisoner's Dilemma games. Neither pair receives feedback about past choices by their own partner but is fully informed about the choices by the other pair. Considering this as a...

Property rights theory suggests that vertical integration is a sensible solution to hold-up problems and therefore improves social welfare. Theories of reciprocity, in contrast, suggest that vertical integration can reduce social welfare if it implies an unfair distribution. Translating the...

This paper presents results from an experiment studying a two-person 4x4 pure coordination game. We seek to identify a labeling of actions that induces subjects to select all options with the same probability. Such a display of actions must be free from salient properties that might be used by...

This paper presents an experiment on the loyalty enhancing effect potentially created by retroactive price reduction schemes. Such price reductions are applied ex post to all units bought in a certain time frame if the total quantity passes a given threshold. Close to the threshold, the marginal...