Contrary to communitarian market criticism institutions relying on money and bidding can strengthen faculties of ‘self-governance’. Securing procedurally egalitarian bidding on the basis of declared monetary evaluations guarantees that all realized changes of a status quo are in an...

Human decision making is a process guided by different and partly competing motivations that can each dominate behavior and lead to different effects depending on strength and circumstances. 'Over-stylizing' neglects such competing concerns and context-dependence, although it facilitates the...

Due to the shadow of the future, exchange and the division of labor can be self-organizing on a small scale while it seems impossible for large interaction systems. The paper indicates that the survival conditions for trustworthiness can be met even in large interaction systems and large markets...

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"...

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...

This paper derives and justifies a procedurally fair bidding mechanism and reviews experiments that apply the mechanism to public projects provision. In the experiments, not all parties benefit from provision, and the projects’ costs can be negative. The experimental results indicate that the...