We conducted a controlled field experiment on eBay and examined to what extent both social and competitive laboratory behavior is robust to institutionally complex real world markets with experienced traders, who selected themselves into these markets. EBay's natural trading system provides...

Many Internet markets rely on feedback systems', essentially social networks of reputation, to facilitate trust and trustworthiness in anonymous transactions. Market competition creates incentives that arguably may enhance or curb the effectiveness of these systems. We investigate how different...

Feedback withdrawal mechanisms in online markets aim to facilitate the resolution of conflicts during transactions. Yet, frequently used online feedback withdrawal rules are flawed and may backfire by inviting strategic transaction and feedback behavior. Our laboratory experiment shows how a...

Voting is a natural context to investigate how democratic societies balance claims of economic efficiency against claims of distributive equity. We examine data from a series of simple experimental voting games; in each, voters are confronted with two distributional policies, one that promotes...

What we now label as "fair behavior" often differs from philopsophical norions of the concept. Establishing a clear understanding of the empirical nature of fairness is important if we are to gauge teh impact fairness has on economic and political institutions.[...]

Several current social utility models posit fairness as a motive for certain types of strategic behavior. The models differ sharply with respect to how fairness is measured. Distribution models measure fairness in terms of relative payoff comparisons. Reciprocal-kindness models measure fairness...