A long time ago most economists would have limited themselves to stating that agreements should be individually rational and efficient and that selecting a specific agreement from that set depends on bargaining and negotiation power whatever that may be. Nowadays hardly any economist will argue...

Similar to welfare economics where with(out) interpersonal comparisons one defines unique (set-valued) welfare (Pareto) optima, we present a framework for one-person decision making where with(out) a prior probability distribution individual optimality prescribes usually a unique (set of)...

On a heterogeneous experimental oligopoly market, sellers choose a price, specify a set-valued prior-free conjecture about the others' behavior, and form their own profit-aspiration for each element of their conjecture. We formally define the concepts of satisficing and prior-free optimality and...

The satisficing approach is generalized and applied to finite n-person games. Based on direct elicitation of aspirations, we formally define the concept of satisficing, which does not exclude (prior-free) optimality but includes it as a border case. We also review some experiments on strategic...

During the last three decades the ascent of behavioral economics clearly helped to bring down artificial disciplinary boundaries between psychology and economics. Noting that behavioral economics seems still under the spell of the rational choice tradition and, indirectly, of behaviorism we...

Bounded rationality questions backward induction, which however, does not exclude such reasoning when anticipation is easy. In our stochastic (alternating offer) bargaining experiment, there is a certain first-period pie and a known finite deadline. What is uncertain (except for the final...

Based on the "acquiring-a-company" game of Samuelson and Bazerman (1985), we theoretically and experimentally analyze the acquisition of a firm. Thereby we compare cases of symmetrically and asymmetrically informed buyers and sellers. This setting allows us to predict and test the effects of...