Direct democracy with its use of referenda avoids the prototypical principal-agent problems of delegation in indirect democracies, especially since elected representatives are usually not committed by law to keep their promises. Sequential or more complex referenda may, however, result in an...

A robust finding of repeated public goods experiments is that high initial contribution rates sharply decline towards the end. This paper reports on an exploratory experiment designed to discover whether such a decline is simply triggered by the usual experimental practice of publicly informing...

Traditional game theory usually relies on commonly known decision rationality meaning that choices are made in view of their consequences (the shadow of the future). Evolutionary game theory, however, denies any cognitive deliberation by assuming that choice behavior evolves due to its past...

Two traditional assumptions in neo-classical economics have been material self-interest and (commonly known) decision rationality. Since there is ample contradictory empirical evidence, many recent attempts have been made to remodel the situation so that rational behavior is more in line with...

We study experimentally how taxpayers choose between two tax regimes to fund a public good. The first-best tax regime imposes a general, distorsion-free income tax. However, this tax cannot be enforced. The second-best alternative supplements the income tax by a specific commodity tax. This tax...

Systematic experiments with distribution games (for a survey, see Roth, 1995) have shown that participants are strongly motivated by fairness and efficiency considerations. This evidence, however, results mainly from experimental designs asking directly for sharing monetary rewards. But even...

Each of several exchange partners is the monopoly owner of a specific commodity which she can share with others. It is optimal to keep the own endowment, but all would gain by mutual gift exchange. Participants play the game repeatedly in constant groups (partner design) and can establish stable...

For given product specifications by two competing firms the demand levels are determined by a randomly generated ideal composition of aspects. Firms can vary some demand. Although the product space is much too large to be explored systematically, we expect (and test for) rather reasonable...

Due to the shadow of the future, exchange and the division of labor can be self-organizing on a small scale while it seems impossible for large interaction systems. The paper indicates that the survival conditions for trustworthiness can be met even in large interaction systems and large markets...

Die menschliche Art ist eine Spezies, die durch Einsatz von Institutionen undNormensystemen kollektive Güter (oder Übel) bereitzustellen vermag.1 Kollektive Güterbilden typischerweise Antworten auf Kollektivgut-Probleme. Eine besonders wichtige Klassesolcher Kollektivgut-Probleme entsteht im...