In this paper I provide an excursus, as complete as I could, of the most important theoretical and experimental works concerning fairness. The aim is twofold. First of all, I want to underline the importance of the role played by experimental economics in testing and improving models on this...

This paper deals with the subject of third-party punishment. The paper compares, by means of an economic experiment, punishment by a third party (Stand-Alone case) with punishment by third parties (In-Group environment). This deliberate introduction of a second potential punisher is neither...

The experiment presented in this paper has two aims, both methodological. First, we want to check for the role of what we may call (after Carpenter et al., 2006) the they came to play effect. Second, we want to test whether the lab outcomes are confirmed by a questionnaire on a hypothetical...

Our research is a variant of the third party punishment game. In particular, we want to test whether players have heterogeneous preferences; the levels of the sanction and of the transfer are proportional to the unfairness of the Dictator; the change of the role influences the Observer's...

The main activity of a welfare state is to impose taxes in order to collect money to provide services. In this paper we want to test subjects' perception of these two steps in the lab. In particular, using a real effort experiment as a tool, we aim at measuring both the labour supply and the...

The aim of this paper is to improve on the model by Fehr and Schmidt (1999) by developing a non-linear model (that leads to interior rather than corner solutions) and by taking into account that different levels of income imply different reactions of fair-minded people. We suggest to modify the...

La teoria dell'Homo Oeconomicus ha fornito una visione formalizzata dell'uomo che, dominato da una natura tendenzialmente egoista, agisce principalmente nel suo interesse. Questa immagine dell'uomo non e' pero' sempre in linea con l'evidenza empirica. Il contributo proveniente da studi condotti...

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate about the electoral rules in Italy. In particular, we simulate some voting rules to test what is the best electoral system on the basis of a utility function that takes into account two indices: representativeness and governability. As long as...

The paper illustrates the results of some experiments aiming to test the effect of taxation on the effort. Differently from previous experiments (Levy-Garboua et al., Sutter and Weck-Hannemann, Swenson), in our research the revenue of taxation is not depleted but employed, more realistically, to...