Based on an axiomatically derived provision rule allowing community members to endogenously determine which, if any, public project should be provided, we perform experiments where (i) not all parties benefit from provision, and (ii) the projects' costs can be negative. In the tradition of legal...

In a duopoly market, aspiration levels express how much sellers want to earn given their expectations about the other's behavior. We augment the sellers' decision task by eliciting their profit aspiration. In a first experimental phase, whenever satisficing is not possible, sales choices, point...

We report on an experiment designed to explore whether and how anger affects future levels of cooperation. Participants play three consecutive one-shot games. In between two identical two-person public goods games there is a mini dictator game that, depending on the treatment, either gives or...

Participants in a public goods experiment receive private or common signals regarding the so-called point of no return, meaning that if the group's total contribution falls below this point, all payoffs are reduced. An individual faces the usual conflict between private and collective interests...

One-way communication has been found to substantially increase contributions in linear voluntary contribution mechanisms. We confirm the robustness of this result in the presence of income heterogeneity.

The satisficing approach is generalized and applied to finite n-person games. Based on direct elicitation of aspirations, we formally define the concept of satisficing, which does not exclude (prior-free) optimality but includes it as a border case. We also review some experiments on strategic...

Previous research indicates that risky and uncertain marginal returns from the public good significantly lower contributions. This paper presents experimental results illustrating that the effects of risk and uncertainty depend on the employed parameterization. Specifically, if the value of the...

We use an experiment to explore how subjects learn to play against computers which are programmed to follow one of a number of standard learning algorithms. The learning theories are (unbeknown to subjects) a best response process, fictitious play, imitation, reinforcement learning, and a trial...

It is well known that the rock-paper-scissors game has no pure saddle point. We show that this holds more generally: A symmetric two-player zero-sum game has a pure saddle point if and only if it is not a generalized rock-paper-scissors game. Moreover, we show that every finite symmetric...