This paper extends the Baron-Ferejohn model of legislative bargaining to general weighted majority games with two modifications: first, payoff division can only be agreed upon after the coalition has formed (two-stage bargaining); second, negotiations in the coalition can break down, in which...

During the last three decades the ascent of behavioral economics clearly helped to bring down artificial disciplinary boundaries between psychology and economics. Noting that behavioral economics seems still under the spell of the rational choice tradition and, indirectly, of behaviorism we...

Negotiations frequently end in conflict after one party rejects a final offer. In a large-scale internet experiment, we investigate whether a 24-hour cooling-off period leads to fewer rejections in ultimatum bargaining. We conduct a standard cash treatment and a lottery treatment, where subjects...

Do contracts provide reference points that affect ex post behavior? We address this question in a canonical buyer-seller relationship with renegotiation. Our paper provides causal experimental evidence that an initial contract has a highly significant and economically important impact on...

Recent research has shed light on the effect of cognitive ability on economic decision-making. By measuring cognitive ability using Raven's progressive matrix test, we investigate this effect on human behavior in two types of experimental ultimatum games. We obtain two significant results....

Economic decisions have been shown to depend on actual outcomes as well as perceived intentions. In this paper, we examine whether and how the relative importance of outcomes or intentions for economic decisions develops with age. We report the results of ultimatum games with children, teens and...

Policy makers and corporations have recently emphasized a code of ethics as an effective aspect of corporate governance. The corporate governance literature in accounting, however, provides little empirical or theoretical support for this emphasis. We address this gap between public policy and...

We argue that heroism is typically adaptive everyday ethical behavior taken to the extreme by over-generalization. We discuss three types of ethical principles with the properties of being cooperative, adaptive in the context of everyday life, but not in one's self-interest when taken to the...