A robust feature of models of electoral competition between two opportunistic, purely office-motivated parties is that both parties become indistinguishable in equilibrium. I this short note, I show that this strong connection between the office motivation of parties and their equilibrium choice...

A robust feature of models of electoral competition between two opportunistic, purely office-motivated parties is that both parties become indistinguishable in equilibrium. I this short note, I show that this strong connection between the office motivation of parties and their equilibrium choice...

In recent debates, morality or social norms have been proposed as an instrument to reduce conflict behavior. As the argument goes, moral people will not engage in socially not-tolerated behavior or, less so than amoral people. Analyzing this question in the framework of contest theory, we find...

One possible solution to mitigate the negative influences of conflict which has been proposed in the literature is to subject the relevant parties to education. Education can take two forms: increasing an individual's human capital on the one hand, increasing her social capital on the other...

The Internet globalizes the world. National regulatory autonomy shrinks. Transferring data from one country to another is almost costless. Foreign content is just a click away. Why is it that states have been able to re-install co-existence in some policy areas, and not in others? In data...

Customary law has been criticized from very different angles. Rational choice theorists claim that what looks like custom is nothing but self-interest. Positivists doubt that anything beyond consent assumes the force of law. In this paper, we adopt an experimental approach to test these claims....

Legal realists expect prosecutors to be selfish. If they get the defendant convicted, this helps them advance their careers. If the odds of winning on the main charge are low, prosecutors have a second option. They can exploit the ambiguity of legal doctrine and charge the defendant for vaguely...

We study experimentally whether and to what extent impartial decision makers are influenced by stakeholders´ fairness opinions in an allocation decision. The setting allows for different focal fairness rules to be considered. We compare communication treatments, in which one of the stakeholders...

The paper investigates the introduction of an institution, in form of an impartial authority (third party), into a two-person situation. The impartial authority can reward a stranger for acting according to a desired behavioral norm. The reward is costly for the authority and her behavior cannot...

According to Adam Smith (1790), human selfishness can be restrained by introspection. We test the effect of introspection on people's willingness to cooperate in a public good game. Drawing on the concept of identity utility (George A. Akerlof and Rachel E. Kranton, 2000), we show theoretically...