We report experimental findings on the role of charitable promises in bargaining settings. We vary the enforceability of such promises within variants of ultimatum games where the proposer suggest a split between himself, the responder and a charitable donation. By reneging on initial pledges,...

We study strategic interaction in an experimental social-preferences vacuum chamber. We mute social preferences by letting participants knowingly interact with computers. Our new design allows for indirect strategic interaction: there are several waves in which computer players inherit the...

This paper deals with the voting rules in the EU Council. Both internal and external impact of the voting rules are evaluated. Internal impact affects the distribution of power among the member states and external impact affects power relations between the main decision-making bodies in the EU....

The Greek bail-out was highly controversial. An oft-heard assessment is that i) the bail-out was a mistake, ii) the political haggling over it was irrational and iii) the bail-out will create a moral hazard problem. Contrary to this view, our analysis suggests that, given EMU's present...

We introduce a model of product development in a firm. Our model describes the process as a multi-stage contest (i.e., race) with an endogenous length (with one stage or two stages) between two workers. We model the payments to workers from the new product using the normatively appealing Nash...

We examine settings - such as litigation, labor relations, or arming and war - in which players first make non-contractible up-front investments to improve their bargaining position and gain advantage for possible future conflict. Bargaining is efficient ex post, but we show that a player may...

Many-player divide-the-dollar games have been a workhorse in the theoretical and experimental analysis of multilateral bargaining. If we are dealing with a loss, that is, if we consider many-player "divide-the-penalty" games for, e.g., the location choice of obnoxious facilities, the allocation...

We frame sustainability problems as bargaining problems among stakeholders who have to agree on a common development path. For infinite alternatives, the set of feasible payoffs is unknown, limiting the possibility to apply classical bargaining theory and mechanisms. We define a framework...

We study experimentally the impact of pre-play social interactions on negotiations. These interactions are often complex. Thus, we attempt to isolate the impact of several of its more common components: conversations, food, and beverages, which could be alcoholic or nonalcoholic. To do this, our...

Real-world negotiations differ fundamentally from existing bargaining theory. Inspired by the Paris Agreement on climate change, this paper develops a novel bargaining game in which each party quantities its own contribution (to a public good, for example), before the set of pledges must be...