Since 1950s, most African nations have gained independence from their colonial powers. Fortunately, independence has brought many changes to these nations and these include multi-party democratic government and western education systems. Unfortunately, the Africa’s economy is the least...

Taking note of the wide variety and growing list of models in the literature to explain patterns of behavior observed in laboratory experiments, this paper identifies two tests, the Variety Test (ability of a model to explain outcomes under variety or alternative scenarios) and the Psychological...

It is difficult to identify acts that are purely altruistic, and do not have some level of egoism or self-interest involved. By considering situations where team members seemingly have nothing to gain by the way they distribute points to others with regard to peer evaluation, and where their...

This work provides experimental evidence of the determinants of tax compliance in Mexico, and compares them to the results of an experiment administered in the United States reported by Alm, Jackson and McKee (1992). The results for both countries are contrasted to the predictions of the...

Many resource allocation contests have the property that individuals undertake costly actions to appropriate a potentially divisible resource. We design an experiment to compare individuals’ decisions across three resource allocation contests which are isomorphic under risk-neutrality. The...

A contest is a situation in which individuals or groups expend costly resources while competing to win a specific prize. The variety of economic situations that can be described as contests has attracted enormous attention from economic theorists. Despite the extensive theoretical research of...

This paper addresses the impact information has on electoral accountability in a legislative system based on seniority using laboratory experiments. A purely rational choice perspective of a simple voting environment implies that information is inconsequential when seniority is exceptionally...

The paper attempts to test the following hypotheses: (i) Are people generally self interested, (ii) If people tend to be generous, what is the motive, i.e., either they fear rejection or do they have a preference for fairness, and (iii) Is there any behavioral difference in bargaining between...

We elicit human conditional punishment types by conducting experiments. We find that their punishment decisions to an individual are on average significantly positively proportional to other members’ punishment decisions to that individual.

Conformity behavior, i.e. the agreement between an individual's choices and the prevailing behavior of a reference group, is a commonly observed phenomenon. Though some types of social interactions may give raise to specific incentives to adopt either a majoritarian or a contrarian behavior, we...