We study communication in a static Cournot duopoly model under the assumption that the firms have unverifiable private information about their costs. We show that cheap talk between the firms cannot transmit any information. However, if the firms can communicate through a third party,...

Industrial organization is mainly concerned with the behavior of large firms. Experimental industrial organization therefore faces a problem: How can firms be brought into the laboratory? The main approach relies on framing: Call individuals firms! This experimental approach is not in line with...

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...

The need for intra-firm incentive schemes allows remodeling the Cournot duopoly in wages (rather than in output levels). In both versions of the Cournot model, a cartel agreement is unstable. The new formulation, however, allows us to demonstrate that a collective wage agreement on minimum wages...

We report results from a Cournot triopoly experiment with different subject pools: German students, Malaysian students, and Malaysian managers. While German students play Nash, we reject the hypothesis that both Malaysian students and managers select the Nash quantity. Moreover, Malaysian...

Suppose the value of a firm is endogenously determined by a manager's costly effort. We call this manager a distinguished player if he also can trade shares of the firm on a market. Arbitrage-free asset pricing theory suggests that the equilibrium market price reflects the value increasing...

This paper further develops the standard modelling of information exchange between firms in the presence of cost uncertainty. In order to avoid consistency problems, we replace the normal distribution of the random variables, commonly used because of its convenient mathematical properties, by an...

The hypothesis that vertically integrated firms have an incentive to foreclose the input market because foreclosure raises its downstream rivals' costs is the subject of much controversy in the theoretical industrial organization literature. A powerful argument against this hypothesis is that,...

This study investigates the impact of pre-play communication on the outcomes in Cournot duopoly and triopoly experiments, using both students and managers as subjects. Communication is implemented by two different devices, a 'standardized-communication' and a free-communication device. We find...

Cooperation in prisoner's dilemma games can usually be sustained only if the game has an infinite horizon. We analyze to what extent the theoretically crucial distinction of finite vs. infinite-horizon games is reflected in the outcomes of a prisoner's dilemma experiment. We compare three...