This experimental study investigates the inuence of irrelevant or phantom al- ternatives on subjects' choices in sequential decision making. Using experimental data from 45 subjects, we found that irrelevant alternatives bear significant rele- vance for decision making. We observe that only 38%...

This paper investigates the existence of an editing phase and studies the com- pliance of subjects' behaviour with the most popular multiattribute decision rules. We observed that our data comply well with the existence of an editing phase, at least if we allow for a natural error rate of some...

We empirically investigate whether the significance of intragenerational redistribution in the public pillar of pension systems in 20 OECD countries has changed systematically since the 1980s and whether international convergence of the degree of intragenerational redistribution can be observed....

In a laboratory experiment subjects were endowed with money and waiting time. Preferences for waiting time reduction were elicited with salient rewards both as a private good and as a public good. The allocations of the public good that were theoretically predicted by the Nash equilibrium and...

We use a two-person public goods experiment to investigate how much agents value conditional cooperation when symmetric positive contributions entail efficiency losses. Asymmetric marginal per capita returns allow only the high-productivity player to increase group payoffs when contributing...

Debating over efficiency-enhancing but inequality-increasing reforms accounts for the routine business of democratic institutions. Fernandez and Rodrik (1991) hold that anti-reform bias can be attributed to individual-specific uncertainty regarding the distribution of gains and losses resulting...

A powerful test of Varian's (1982) generalised axiom of revealed preference (GARP) with two goods requires the consumer's budget line to pass through two demand vectors revealed as chosen given other budget sets. In an experiment using this idea, each of 41 student subjects faced a series of 16...

This paper reports on an experimental investigation into the perception of fairness in taxation. 219 subjects rated their own tax burdens, stated their preferred type of tax scale, and proposed fair tax burdens for a number of reference households. While the former two tasks involved qualitative...

In this paper, we measure the extent and dissemination of the retreat of the state from entrepreneurial activities in 20 OECD countries during the 1980–2007 period using a three-dimensional concept and a new dataset, the REST database. We consider privatization, deregulation in network-based...