We examine the relative performances of reverse auctions and request for quotes in a simple commodity environment. Enterprises embarking on a reverse auction initiative often start with their commodity purchases. We conduct laboratory experiments and find that this is a poor starting point. Both...

We present evidence from laboratory experiments of behavioral spillovers and cognitive load that spread across strategic contexts. In the experiments, subjects play two distinct games simultaneously with different opponents. We find that the strategies chosen and the efficiency of outcomes in...

We investigate the welfare implications of unfair incentive contracts in comparison with interactions without contracts. Reciprocal people should cooperate conditionally in the latter situation but punish unfairness by non-cooperation. We confirm that some people do cooperate conditionally in a...

Because game theory suggests that the origin of a common-pool resource should not affect appropriation behavior, experimental studies of appropriation from common-pool resources generally presume resources are exogenously provided. However, behavioral economic research indicates that the origin...

Understanding the motivations behind people’s voluntary contributions to public goods is crucial for the broader issues of economic and social development. By using the experimental design of Fischbacher et al. (2001), we investigate the distribution of contribution types in two developing...

We provide a game theoretic analysis of how power shapes the clarity of communication. We analyze information transmission in a cheap talk bargaining game between an informed Sender and an uninformed Receiver. Theoretically, we find that the maximum amount of information that can be transmitted...

Growing interest in using personality variables in economic research leads to the question whether personality as measured by psychology is useful to predict economic behavior. Is it reasonable to expect values on personality scales to be predictive of behavior in economic games? It is undoubted...

We test the Average Credible Deviation Criterion (ACDC), a stability measure and refinement for cheap talk equilibria introduced in De Groot Ruiz, Offerman & Onderstal (2011b). ACDC has been shown to be predictive under general conditions and to organize data well in previous experiments meant...

In the past, many refinements have been proposed to select equilibria in cheap talk games. Usually, these refinements were motivated by a discussion of how rational agents would reason in some particular cheap talk games. In this paper, we propose a new refinement and stability measure that is...

We show that the standard trust question routinely used in social capital research is importantly related to cooperation behavior and we provide evidence on the microfoundation of this relation. We run a large-scale public goods experiment over the internet in Denmark using a design that enables...