We explore in an experiment what leads to the breakdown of partnerships. Subjects are assigned a partner and participate in a repeated public good game with stochastic outcomes. They can choose each period between staying in the public project or working on their own. There is excessive exit as...

How malleable are peopleś fairness ideals? Although fairness is an oft-invoked concept in allocation situations, it is still unclear whether and to what extent peopleś allocations reflect their fairness ideals. We investigate in a laboratory experiment whether peopleś fairness ideals vary...

We propose a meta-heuristic approach for solving nonlinear dynamic tracking games. In contrast to more "traditional" methods based on linear-quadratic (LQ) techniques, this derivative-free method is very flexible (e.g. to introduce inequality constraints). The meta-heuristic is applied to a...

This paper provides a new way to identify conditional cooperation in a real-time version of the standard voluntary contribution mechanism. Our approach avoids most drawbacks of the traditional procedures because it relies on endogenous cycle lengths, which are defined by the number of...

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...

One may hope to capture the behavioral and emotional effects of downsizing the laborforce in rather abstract settings as an ultimatum game (see Fischer et al. (2008)), or try to explore downsizing in its more natural principalagent scenario with a labor market background. We pursue the latter...

Two auction mechanisms are studied in which players compete with one another for an exogenously determined prize by independently submitting integer bids in some discrete and commonly known strategy space specified by the auctioneer. In the unique lowest (highest) bid auction game, the winner of...

Previous research indicates that risky and uncertain marginal returns from the public good significantly lower contributions. This paper presents experimental results illustrating that the effects of risk and uncertainty depend on the employed parameterization. Specifically, if the value of the...

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...

We report experimental and theoretical results on the minority of three-game where three players have to choose one of two alternatives independently and the most rewarding alternative is the one chosen by a single player. This coordination game has many asymmetric equilibria in pure strategies...