We study experimentally a standard four-player Hotelling game, with a uniform density of consumers and inelastic demand. The pure strategy Nash equilibrium configuration consists of two firms located at one quarter of the ``linear city'', and the other two at three quarters. We do not observe...

A cartel is socially not desirable. But is it a normative problem? And has merger control reason to be concerned about tacit collusion? Neither is evident once one has seen that the members of a cartel face a problem of strategic interaction. It is routinely analysed in terms of game theory....

Two major methods of explaining economic institutions, namely by strategic choices or through (indirect) evolution, are compared for the case of a homogenous quadratic duopoly market. Sellers either can provide incentives for agents to care for sales, or evolve as sellers who care for sales in...

This paper examines a two-period mixed market model in which a welfaremaximizing public firm and a profit-maximizing private firm can use inventory investment as a strategic device. It is then demonstrated that the equilibrium in the second period coincides with the Stackelberg solution where...

We examine the behaviors of one state-owned welfare-maximizing firm and one labor-managed income-per-worker-maximizing firm in a two-stage mixed market model with capacity investment as a strategic instrument. In the first stage, each firm independently decides whether or not to install...

Empirical work on Akerlof’s theory of gift exchange in labor markets has concentrated on the fair wage-effort hypothesis. In fact, however, the theory also contains a social component that stipulates that homogenous agents that are employed for the same wage level will exert more effort,...

Empirical work on Akerlof’s theory of gift exchange in labor markets has concentrated on the fair wage-effort hypothesis. In fact, however, the theory also contains a social component that stipulates that homogenous agents that are employed for the same wage level will exert more effort,...

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...

Transparency in teams can induce cooperation. We study contribution decisions by agents when previous decisions can be observed. We find that an information chain, in which each agent directly observes only the decision of her immediate predecessor, is at least as effective as a...

This paper considers a two-stage quantity-setting duopoly model. The paper classifies demand functions into the following four cases in terms of the goods relevance and strategic relevance between both firms: ‘substitute goods and strategic substitutes’, ‘substitute goods and strategic...