The variable threat-bargaining model of Nash (1953) assumes that threats in the sense of binding commitments as to what one will do if bargaining ends in conflict, are chosen before bargaining. By comparision, late threats to be chosen after bargaining end in conflict, appear more natural and...

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...

Two firms, firm A in country A and firm B in country B, compete in hiring two types of workers. Type 1-workers would be less productive when working abroad whereas type 2-workers are equally productive when working abroad or at home. Employers compete by offering employment contracts for both...

On an otherwise symmetric oligopoly market with stochastic demands for heterogeneous products firms can either hire an employee or partner or buy the required labor input on the labor market. Whereas the wage of hired labor does not depend in the realization of stochastic demand, the price of...

Two firms, each consisting of a team with the owner and just one employee, compete on the labor market with free labor mobility. After observing the investment decisions by firm owners their employees can engage in costly training, thus increasing their general and firm-specific productivity,...

This paper focuses on the uneasy alliance of rational choice and evolutionary explanations in modern economics. While direct evolutionary explanations of "optimality" rule out "purposeful" rational choice by assuming zero-intelligence and pure rational choice explanations leave no room for...

In this paper we consider conventions as regularities in behavior which help to solve coordination problems in a society. These problems can be formalized as non-cooperative games with several equilibria. We know that in such situations serious problems of equilibrium selection arise which...

In a stochastic duopoly market, sellers must form state-specific aspirations expressing how much they want to earn given their expectations about the other's behavior. We define individually and mutually satisficing sales behavior for given individual beliefs and aspiration profiles. In a first...

Taking seriously the philosophical foundations of classical strategic theories of choice-making we scrutinize to what extent planning on equilibrium strategies can be justified "eductively" among rational players and how this can be utilized to analyze games by their "game-like" sub-structures,...

There is robust field data showing that a frequent and successful way of looking for a job is via the intermediation of friends and relatives. Here we want to explore this experimentally. Participants first play a simple public good game with two interaction partners ("friends"), and share...