Understanding how observers attribute intentionality to people in the focus of their attention helps in shedding light on punishment behavior. In this paper we approach impartial observers' attributions of intentionality and the attachment of praise and blame to perpetrators of external effects....

Numerous studies suggest that communication may be a universal means to mitigate collective action problems. In this study, we challenge this view and show that the communication structure crucially determines whether communication mitigates or intensifies the problem of collective action. We...

This paper surveys the recent literature on the political economy of the formation of international environmental agreements. The survey covers theoretical modelling approaches and empirical studies including experimental work. Central to our survey is the question how the political process...

A group of actors, individuals or firms, can engage in collectively providing projects which may be costly or generating revenues and which may benefit some and harm others. Based on requirements of procedural fairness (Güth and Kliemt, 2013), we derive a bidding mechanism determining...

This paper experimentally investigates the effect of limits on campaign spending and outcome in an electoral contest where two candidates, an incumbent and a challenger, compete for office in terms of the amount of campaign expenditure. The candidates are asymmetric only in that the incumbent...

The key element of models of contest is the Contest Success Function (CSF) which specifies the winning probabilities of agents. We provide an axiomatization of two parametric families of CSF’s. In the first, the winning probability of each agent depends on the investments and a vector of...

Despite the fact that policymakers often have a short-term horizon and prefer discretionary over rule bound policy, one can observe policy reform with a focus on rules and long-term orientation. Sometimes reforms are driven by crisis, sometimes they are pursued in times of relative prosperity....

Today's theorizing about economic policy is still dominated by a method of analysis that can be refered to as "instrumentalistic-technological". Especially typical for that method is the complete abstraction from cognitive-evolutionary aspects of economic-policy interaction. However, including...

All rulers face political competition, both from rivals within their state, and from other states to which their subjects may exit. In a simple model, both kinds of competition are substitutes. Internal competition (democracy) bene?ts citizens by allowing them to replace rent-seeking rulers. But...

The key element of models of contest is the Contest Success Function (CSF) which specifies the winning probabilities of agents. The existing axiomatizations of CSFs assume that contestants can make only one type of investment. This paper generalizes these axiomatizations to the case where each...