In the Solidarity Game (Selten and Ockenfels, 1998), two "rich" persons can support a "poor" one. A strong positive correlation between one rich person's solidarity contribution and his expected contribution of the other is observed. This paper investigates the causality behind this correlation....

In the presented paper we introduce an approach to assess particular economic effects which may arise with bringing mobile technologies into the field of sales and distribution. The research problem posed here comprises quite a special case where sales operations of a company are carried by its...

In Dictator Game experiments where the information status of the recipient varies we find that a certain type of donator tends to reduce his offer when the recipient has incomplete information about the pie size. This result provides new evidence on those approaches on altruism, which assume...

How can a principal (an agent) ensure that an agent (a principal) will work (pay up), if payment (work) precedes work (payment)? When a banknote is torn in two, each part is by itself worthless. A principal can pre-commit to payment-on-delivery, by tearing a banknote and giving the agent the...

Threshold Accepting (TA) is a powerful optimization heuristic from the class of stochastic local search algorithms. It has been applied successfully to different optimization problems in statistics and econometrics, including the uniform design problem. Using the latter application as example,...

Efficiency wage effects of profit sharing are combined with option values related to stochastic future pofit variations. These option effects occur if the workers' profit share is fixed by long-term contracts. The Pareto-improving optimal level of the sharing ratio is calculated for two...

Since campaign finance reform is usually motivated by the concern that existing legislation can not effectively prevent campaign contributions to 'buy favors', this paper assumes that contributions influence political decisions. But, given that it is also widely recognized that interest groups...

This short survey discusses recent findings on the robustness of Nash equilibria of strategic games with many semianonymous players. It describes the notion of structural robustness and its general consequences, as well as implications to particular games, such as ones played on the web and...

The assumption that decision makers choose actions to maximize their preferences is a central tenet in economics. This assumption is often justied either formally or informally by appealing to evolutionary arguments. In contrast, we show that in almost every game and for almost every family of...

This paper examines the ability of a policy maker to control equilibrium outcomes in a global coordination game; applications include currency attacks, bank runs, and debt crises. A unique equilibrium is known to survive when the policy is exogenously fixed. We show that, by conveying...