We resume the search for a collusive focal-point effect of price ceilings in laboratory markets. We argue that market conditions in previous studies were unfavorable for collusion which may have been responsible for not finding such a focal-point effect. Our design aims at maximizing the...

We investigate whether peer punishment is an efficient mechanism for enforcing cooperation in an experiment with a long time horizon. Previous evidence suggests that the costs of peer punishment can be outweighed by the benefits of higher cooperation, if (i) there is a sufficiently long time...

We consider the interaction of intrinsic motivation and concerns for social approval in a laboratory experiment. We elicit a proxy for Fairtrade preferences before the experiment. In the experiment, we elicit willingness to pay for conventional and Fairtrade chocolate. Treatments vary whether...

Mobility of high income individuals across borders puts pressure on governments to lower taxes. A central tenet of the underlying theoretical and empirical models is that mobile individuals react to tax differentials through migration, and in turn immobile households vote for lower taxes in the...

In democracies, an absolute majority of the population may choose policies that are harmful to the rest of the population. A purpose of super-majority rules is to prevent this from happening. We study whether individuals optimally choose sub- or super-majority rules when the rights of minorities...

Winning bidders in online auctions frequently fail to complete the transaction. Because enforcing bids usually is too costly, auction platforms often allow sellers to make a "secondchance" offer to the second highest bidder, to buy at the bid price of this bidder, and let sellers leave negative...

Optimal voting rules have to be adjusted to the underlying distribution of preferences. However, in practice there usually is no social planner who can perform this task. This paper shows that the introduction of a stage at which agents may themselves choose voting rules according to which they...

We conduct multi-person one-shot ultimatum games that reflect important aspects of collective bargaining. In all treatments a proposer has to divide a pie among herself and six recipients that are divided into two groups of three. The proposer cannot discriminate among, but across group members....

This paper explores whether tax planning by households is consistent with a minimization of the family tax burden or whether and to what extent altruism and concerns about the tax loss of individual household members matter. To this end, we take advantage of a specific feature of the German tax...

Public goods provision often involves groups of contributors repeatedly interacting with administrators who can extract rents from the pool of contributions. We suggest a novel identification approach that exploits the sequential ordering of decisions in a panel vector autoregressive model to...