Purchases by government agencies from private sector firms are often initiated by solicitation of bids to supply the desired items. Payment to the firm that is awarded the supply contract may be determined by (a) the bid price or (b) bid price plus a share of the difference between observable...

This chapter focuses on laboratory experimental examinations of a particular class of institutions, policies or mechanisms of monopoly control. These are mechanisms which take the existence of a monopoly as a given and ask how might the abuses of monopoly be controlled in a decentralized manner....

The incentive failure of government ownership of public utility industries has helped to motivate the worldwide privatization of these industries. Similar shortcomings of rate-of-return regulation in the United States has led to major changes in the way in which the gas, telephone and cable TV...

This chapter defines various social distances as the degree of reciprocity that people believe is inherent within a social interaction. The greater the social distance, or isolation, between a person and others, the weaker is the scope for reciprocal relations. This chapter conjecture that the...

The current cultural norms with regard to sharing, cooperation, trust, and punishment are the result of 23 million years of evolution and adaptation. During most of those 23 million years, humans lived in small interactive groups and developed behaviors and strategies to promote cooperation and...

The results demonstrated in this chapter quite clearly the impact of property rights on the shared expectations about appropriate proposer behavior in both ultimatum and dictator games. If the game is presented as division (which by one definition means literally to separate into equal parts by...

This chapter presents data based on treatment manipulations intended to affect subjects' expectations about others' behavior, and degree of social isolation (anonymity) from the experimenter and others who might see the results, holding constant subject anonymity with respect to each other .The...

This chapter examines the robustness of his results in a more general multi-unit per subject setting and systematically investigates the effect of various order flow information and message restriction rules on the performance of the Walrasian auction. This experimental environment allows us to...

The trading rules for the first price auction can be summarized as follows. A single object is offered in perfectly inelastic supply to N 2 bidders. Each bidder submits a single bid for the commodity with the understanding that the commodity will be awarded to the highest bidder at a price...

The emergence of empirical evidence suggesting divergence between the willingness- to-accept (WTA), for the sale of an object, and the willingness-to-pay (WTP), for the purchase of an object, has resulted in two explanations. Further they argue that the endowment effect will not apply when the...