This paper experimentally examines a procedurally fair provision mechanism allowing members of a small community to determine, via their bids, which of four alternative public projects to implement. Previous experiments with positive cost projects have demonstrated that the mechanism is...

This paper reconsiders the literature on the irrelevance of privatization in mixed markets, addressing both quantity and price competition in a duopoly with differentiated products. By allowing for partially privatizing a state-controlled firm, we explore competition under different timings of...

We examine a monopolistic supplier's decision about a pure public good when he/she must negotiate with beneficiaries of the good. In our model, while the level of the public good is decided unilaterally by the supplier, the cost share of the public good is negotiated between the supplier and...

A profit-maximizing public good supplier endogenously determines the level of the public good and simultaneously negotiates with beneficiaries of the good one by one. A pre-negotiation commitment on the production level of the public good by the supplier enhances the internalization of...

The competitive market structure of a decentralized economy is converted into a self-policing system treating the bureaucracy and enforcement of the legal system endogenously. In particular we consider money systems as constructs to make agents' economic strategies predictable from knowledge of...

Standard political economy models of redistribution, notably that of Meltzer and Richard (1981), fail to account for the remarkable variance in government redistribution across democracies. We develop a general model of redistribution that explains why some democratic governments are more prone...

To explain why pre-play communication increases cooperation in games,one refers to a) strategic causes such as efficient communication or reputationeffects, and b) changes in the utilities due to social processes. Hithertoexperimental support for both explanations is mixed and confounded....

We set up a two-stage game with sequential moves by one altruistic agent andn selfish agents. The rotten kid theorem states that the altruist can only reach her firstbest when the selfish agents move before the altruist. The Samaritan’s dilemma, on theother hand, states that the altruist can...

We analyze the effects of introducing asymmetric information and expectations in the investment game (Berg et al., 1995). In our experiment, only the trustee knows the size of the surplus. Subjects' expectations about each other's behavior are also elicited. (...)

A common feature of the literature on the evolution of preferencesis that evolution favors nonmaterialistic preferences only if preferencetypes are observable at least to some degree. We argue that this resultis due to the assumption that in each state of the evolutionary dynam-ics some Bayesian...