This paper reports an experiment evaluating the effect of gift giving on building trust. We have nested our explorations in the standard version of the investment game. Our gift treatment includes a dictator stage in which the trustee decides whether to give a gift to the trustor before both of...

We report the results of a combination of a dictator experiment with either a "social planner" or a "veil of ignorance" experiment. The experimental design and the analysis of the data are based on the theoretical framework proposed in the companion paper by Becker, Häger, and Heufer (BHH,...

Based on the "acquiring-a-company" game of Samuelson and Bazerman (1985), we theoretically and experimentally analyze the acquisition of a firm. Thereby we compare cases of symmetrically and asymmetrically informed buyers and sellers. This setting allows us to predict and test the effects of...

We propose and experimentally test a mechanism for a class of principal-agent problems in which agents can observe each others' efforts. In this mechanism each player costlessly assigns a share of the pie to each of the other players, after observing their contributions, and the final...

We investigate the effect of absence of common knowledge on the outcomes of coordination games in a laboratory experiment. Using cognitive types, we can explain coordination failure in pure coordination games while differentiating between coordination failure due to first- and higher-order...