Even if contract enforcers are as opportunistic as ordinary traders, a system of adjudication can increase the degree to which contractual obligations on large anonymous markets are fulfilled. Only if arbitrators receive a fixed income, occasional mistakes will not favour the untrustworthy. It...

Behavioural economics and economic experiments can offer valuable insights to policymakers. Liberal or soft paternalism assumes that governmental nudging through the conscious setting of defaults in order to overcome potential behavioural anomalies can lead to better outcomes without giving up...

Unanimous voting as the fundamental procedural source of political legitimacy grants veto power to each individual. We present an axiomatic characterization of a class of bidding processes to spell out the underlying egalitarian values for collective projects of a "productive state". At heart of...

Relying on the specific example of ultimatum bargaining experiments this paper explores the possible role of empirical knowledge of behavioural "norm(ative) facts" within the search for (W)RE -- (Wide) Reflective Equilibria on normative issues. Assuming that "pro-social" behaviour "reveals"...

We study strategic interfirm competition allowing for internal conflicts in each seller firm. Intrafirm conflicts are captured by a multi-agent framework with principals implementing a revenue sharing scheme. For a given number of agents, interfirm competition leads to a higher revenue share for...

nnovative behavior is mostly studied theoretically, e.g., in models of patent races, and empirically, e.g., by using R&D or patent data. This research, however, is only poorly informed about the psychological tradition of creativity research. Our study is an attempt to experimentally collect...

We study interfirm price competition in the presence of horizontal and vertical intrafirm conflicts in each firm. Intrafirm conflicts are captured by a principal-agent framework with firms employing more than one agent and implementing a tournament incentive scheme. The principals offer premium...

Game and decision theory start from rather strong premises. Preferences, represented by utilities, beliefs represented by probabilities, common knowledge and symmetric rationality as background assumptions are treated as “given.” A richer language enabling us to capture the process leading...