This paper reports on a laboratory experiment which investigates the impact of institutions and institutional choice in constant-sum sender-receiver games. We compare individual sender and receiver behavior in two different institutions: A sanction-free institution which is given by the bare...

In this paper we show experimentally that in a sequential auction the presence of synergies leads to more overbidding which in turn may result in bankruptcies. In line with theoretical predictions we find that the seller benefits from the buyers’ synergies. In contrast to theory the buyers...

To allow society to treat unequal alternatives distinctly we propose a natural extension of Approval Voting [7] by relaxing the assumption of neutrality. According to this extension, every alternative receives ex-ante a non-negative and finite weight. These weights may differ across...

We show in a sender-receiver game with strictly opposing interests that rewards enhance trust but do not influence truth-telling. Subjects who reward tend to tell the truth and trust more often in the presence and absence of reward opportunities. The amount of obtained rewards thereby enhances...

In this paper we show experimentally that in a sequential auction the presence of synergies leads to more overbidding which in turn may result in bankruptcies. In line with theoretical predictions we find that the seller benefits from the buyers’ synergies. In contrast to theory the buyers...

The literature on the computation of Nash equilibria in n-person games is dominated by simplicial methods. This paper is the first to introduce a globally convergent algorithm that fully exploits the differentiability present in the problem. It presents an everywhere differentiable homotopy to...

A probabilistic belief revision function assigns to every initial probabilistic belief and every observable event some revised probabilistic belief that only attaches positive probability to states in this event. We propose three axioms for belief revision functions: (1) linearity, meaning that...

Both in game theory and in general equilibrium theory there exists a number of universally stable adjustment processes. In game theory these processes typically serve the role of selecting a Nash equilibrium. Examples are the tracing procedure of Harsanyi and Selten or the equilibrium selection...

Social environments constitute a framework in which it is possible to study how groups of agents interact in a society. The framework is general enough to analyse both non-cooperative and cooperative games. We identify a number of shortcomings of existing solution concepts that are used for...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the existence of implicit taxes in the corporate sector. With this finding, it provides support for the offsetting nature of explicit versus implicit taxes. Governments continuously provide tax preferences (tax incentives) to firms to induce these firms...