A long time ago most economists would have limited themselves to stating that agreements should be individually rational and efficient and that selecting a specific agreement from that set depends on bargaining and negotiation power whatever that may be. Nowadays hardly any economist will argue...

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...

We experimentally manipulate the efficiency of trust and reciprocity in a modified Investment Game. The aim of our manipulation is to test whether reciprocity is mainly affected by payoff consequences of trust or by intentions underlying it. We find that intentions matter and that consequences...

We consider three-person envy games with a proposer, a responder, and a dummy player. In this class of games, the proposer, rather than allocating a constant pie, chooses the pie size which the responder can then accept or reject while the dummy player can only refuse his own share. While the...

Approximate truth refers to the principle that border cases should be analyzed by solving generic cases and solving border cases as limits of generic ones (Brennan et al., 2008). Our study experimentally explores whether this conceptual principle is also behaviorally appealing. To do so, we...

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...

Facing a stochastic market wage, which is independent of their own hiring policy, employers offer contracts specifying fixed wage, revenue share and employment duration. In ongoing employment relations it depends on the treatment whether fixed wages can be only increased or also decreased. Will...

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...

In a public goods experiment, subjects can vary over a period of stochastic length two contribution levels: one is publicly observable (their cheap talk stated intention), while the other is not seen by the others (their secret intention). When the period suddenly stops, participants are...

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...