This paper argues that the notion of focal points is important in understanding bargaining processes. Recent literature confines a discussion of the usefulness of the notion to coordination problems and when bargaining experiments result in outcomes that are inconsistent with a straightforward...

Contract audits aimed at reducing information asymmetry and transaction costs are frequently used in imperfect markets such as defense procurement. This contradicts predictions from standard economic theory. We conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate this paradox. Our laboratory setup...

Numerous gift exchange experiments have found a positive relationship between employers' wage offers and workers' effort levels. In (almost) all these experiments the employer both owns and controls the firm. Yet in reality many firms are characterized by the separation of ownership and control....

We investigate expectation formation in a controlled experimental en- vironment. Subjects are asked to predict the price in a standard asset pricing model. They do not have knowledge of the underlying market equilibrium equa- tions, but they know all past realized prices and their own...

This paper studies behavior in experiments with a linear voluntary contributions mechanism for public goods conducted in Japan, the Netherlands, Spain and the USA. The same experimental design was used in the four countries. Our 'contribution function' design allows us to obtain a view of...

In experimental investigations of the effect of real incentives, accountability—the implicit or explicit expectation of a decision maker that she may have to justify her decisions in front of somebody else—is often confounded with the incentives themselves. This confounding of accountability...

We analyze the simplest Condorcet cycle with three players and three alternatives within a strategic bargaining model with recognition probabilities and costless delay. Mixed consistent subgame perfect equilibria exist whenever the geometric mean of the agents' risk coefficients, ratios of...

We introduce a form of pre-play communication that we call "preopening". During the preopening, players announce their tentative actions to be played in the underlying game. Announcements are made using a posting system which is subject to stochastic failures. Posted actions are publicly...

Theoretical research on claims problems has concentrated on normative properties and axiomatizations of solution concepts. We complement these analyses by empirical evidence on the predictability of three classical solution concepts in a bankruptcy problem. We examine both people's impartial...

We study a bargaining model with a disagreement game between offers and counteroffers. In order to characterize the set of its subgame perfect equilibrium payoffs, we provide a recursive technique that relies on the Pareto frontier of equilibrium payoffs. When players have different time...