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 presents a new perspective on the nature of fairness in bargaining by using verbal data from spontaneous team discussions and written statements on decision motives. Systematic content analysis proves a valuable source for providing new insights. The nature of fairness can be viewed...

We present the results of an experiment that measures social preferences within couples in a context where intra-household pay-off inequality can be reduced at the cost of diminishing household income. We measure social norms regarding this efficiency-equality trade-off and implement a...

Economists tend to assume that agents maximize their expected utility. However, many different experiments have questioned expected utility maximization by showing that human behavior can be characterized as random. This paper proposes Thompson Sampling as a theory of human behavior across very...

More and more often the partner in this decision is not another human but, instead, a machine. Here we ask whether a machine partner affects our responsibility, our perception of the choice and our choice differently from a human partner. We use a modified dictator game with two joint decision...

We investigate the effects of voting power in a committee in which one member (the chairman) holds, on top of a regular vote, also the power to break ties. The chairman is able to induce her preferred outcome much more often than predicted by theory, but only partially because of exercising...

Social identity is an important driver of behavior. But where do difierences in social identity come from? We use a novel laboratory experiment based on a revealed preference approach to analyze how individuals choose their identity. Facing a trade-off between monetary payments and belonging to...

Transparency and accountability are often regarded as crucial for good governance and the efficient organization of public affairs. To systematically explore the impact of transparency and accountability on cooperation, we conduct a series of laboratory experiments on a variation of the public...

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...