Quotas for special groups of students often apply in school or university admission procedures. This paper studies the performance of two mechanisms to implement such quotas in a lab experiment. The first mechanism is a simplified version of the mechanism currently employed by the German central...

We study the impact of progress feedback in team-production contests, in which each team member is solely responsible for one part of the production task. Particularly, we employ a real-effort laboratory experiment to examine how team members react to the feedback in team-based (best-of-three)...

We implement a simple two-shop search model in the laboratory with the aim of testing if consumers behave differently in equivalent situations, where prices are displayed either as net prices or as gross prices with discounts. We compare search behavior in base treatments (where both shops post...

We analyze bargaining over international climate agreements in a setting with incomplete information about abatement costs. Unilateral commitment to high abatement reduces the gains from global cooperation. This reduces the probability of reaching efficient international environmental agreements.

Private provision of public goods often takes place as a war of attrition: individuals wait until someone else volunteers and provides the good. After a certain time period, however, one individual may be randomly selected. If the individuals are uncertain about their cost of provision, but can...

Our experimental analysis of alliances in conflicts leads to three main findings. First, even in the absence of repeated interaction, direct contact or communication, free-riding among alliance members is far less pronounced than what would be expected from non-cooperative theory. Second, this...

This paper analyzes the role of narrowly selfish and other-regarding preferences for the median voter in a Meitzer-Richard (1981) framework. We use computerized and real human co-players to distinguish between these sets of motivations. Redistribution to real co-players has a negative effect on...

Previous experimental results on one-shot sequential two-player games show that group decisions are closer to the subgame-perfect Nash equilbirum than individual decisions. We extend the analysis of inter-group versus inter-individual decision making to a Stackelberg market game, by running both...

This paper adds to the economic-psychological research on tax compliance by experimentally testing a simple auditing rule that induces strategic uncertainty among taxpayers. Under this rule, termed the bounded rule, taxpayers are informed of the maximum number of audits by a tax authority, so...

Prices usually adjust much faster when costs increase than when costs decrease. The mechanism driving this "Rockets-and-Feathers" phenomenon is not well understood despite of ample empirical evidence for its existence. We use simple experimental markets with and without consumer search and...