In this paper we compare - in the laboratory - stoppage and virtual strike. Our experiment confirms that higher wages offered by an employer lead to considerably more costly effort provision. The number of strikes, the level of efforts and average total payoffs are higher under virtual strike...

This paper compares outsourcing processes in France, Italy and Japan in two types of firms, large firms and also small firms. It is shown that outsourcing has increased over the last two decades in both small and large firms in all three countries and that mainly in the last decade the tendency...

An historical overview of experimental economics points out significant analogies between its origins and the contemporary emergence of game theory. In both cases, their effective introduction in economics was postponed until the 1960s. Such a delay cannot be ascribed to the supposed division...

This paper gives an interpretation of the recent diffusion of the processes of productive outsourcing founded on two explanatory points. The first is that such processes replace a hierarchical paradigm of information diffusion with a decentralized paradigm in which independent subcontracting...

This paper analyses the early contributions of John Harsanyi and Thomas C. Schelling to bargaining theory. In the 1950s Harsanyi draws Nash's solution to two-person cooperative games from the bargaining model proposed by Zeuthen (1930) and Schelling proposes a multi-faceted theory of conflict...

The theory of drift (Binmore and Samuelson 1999) concerns equilibrium selection in which second-order disturbances may have first-order effects in the emergence of one equilibrium over the other. We provided experimental evidence with human players supporting the model in Caminati, Innocenti and...

This paper compares outsourcing processes in France, Italy and Japan in two types of firms, large firms and also small firms. It is shown that outsourcing has increased over the last two decades in both small and large firms in all three countries and that mainly in the last decade the tendency...

This paper argues that the acceptance of two recent methodological advances in economics, namely game theory and laboratory experimentation, was affected by the history dependence constraining the formalization of economics. After an early period in which the two methods were coolly received by...