In the economic literature on market competition, firms are often modeled as single decision makers and the internal organization of the firm is neglected (unitary player assumption). However, as the literature on strategic delegation suggests, one can not generally expect that the behavior of...

We report results from a Cournot triopoly experiment with different subject pools: German students, Malaysian students, and Malaysian managers. While German students play Nash, we reject the hypothesis that both Malaysian students and managers select the Nash quantity. Moreover, Malaysian...

A cartel is socially not desirable. But is it a normative problem? And has merger control reason to be concerned about tacit collusion? Neither is evident once one has seen that the members of a cartel face a problem of strategic interaction. It is routinely analysed in terms of game theory....

One may hope to capture the behavioral and emotional effects of downsizing the laborforce in rather abstract settings as an ultimatum game (see Fischer et al. (2008)), or try to explore downsizing in its more natural principalagent scenario with a labor market background. We pursue the latter...

One-shot interaction and repeated interaction often co-exist in the real world. We study possible behavioral effects of this co-existence in a principal-agent setting, in which a principal simultaneously employs a permanent and a temporary agent. Our experimental results indicate that there is...

Empirical work on Akerlof's theory of gift exchange in labor markets has concentrated on the fair wage-effort hypothesis. In fact, however, the theory also contains a social component that stipulates that homogenous agents that are employed for the same wage level will exert more effort,...

Our results from a laboratory experiment offer new evidence for the detrimental effects that cheating behaviour in the workplace may have on the degree of reciprocity between firms and workers. First, we replicate existing findings showing that in the absence of monitoring (cheating is possible)...

We experimentally test whether intentional and observable discriminatory pay of symmetric agents in the Winter (2004) game causes low paid agents to reduce effort. We control for intentionality of wages by either allowing a principal to determine wages or by implementing a random process. Our...

This paper analyzes grading competition between instructors of elective courses when students shop for high course scores, the instructors maximize class size, and the school imposes a ceiling on mean course scores to limit grade inflation. Under this grading norm, we demonstrate that curriculum...

One key problem regarding the external validity of laboratory experiments is their duration: while economic interactions out in the field are often lengthy processes, typical lab experiments only last for an hour or two. To address this problem for the case of both symmetric and asymmetric...