Based on survey data for Switzerland, new empirical findings on direct democracy are presented. In the first part, we show that, on average, public employees receive lower financial compensation under more direct democratic institutions. However, top bureaucrats are more constrained in direct...

People not only obtain utility from actual outcomes but also from the conditions which lead to these outcomes. The paper proposes an economic concept of this notion of procedural utility. Preferences beyond outcome can be manifold. We distinguish procedural utility people get from institutions...

Nordic historians have asserted for a long time that in the Nordic countries only few people, if any, perceived increased threats of war prior to the World War II outbreak. This would explain, and possibly excuse, why their governments did not mobilize their armies until it was too late. This...

I give necessary and sufficient conditions for the uniqueness of the equilibrium in a wide class of Rubinstein bargaining models. The requirements encompass a class of non-convex or disconnected payoff sets with discontinuous Pareto frontiers. The equilibrium of the non-cooperative game is...

An individual makes random errors when evaluating the expected utility of a risky lottery. Errors are symmetrically distributed around zero as long as an individual does not make transparent mistakes such as choosing a risky lottery over its highest possible outcome for certain. This stochastic...

This paper shows that identical offers in an ultimatum game generate systematically different rejection rates depending on the other offers that are available to the proposer. This result casts doubt on the consequentialist practice in economics to define the utility of an action solely in terms...

What determines reciprocity in employment relations? We conducted a controlled field experiment to measure the extent to which monetary and non-monetary gifts affect workers’ performance. We find that non-monetary gifts have a much stronger impact than monetary gifts of equivalent value. We...

The paper analyzes the infinite-horizon alternating-offers bargaining game between agents with inequity-averse preferences. Without prior investments, the model predicts a shift of the outcome towards equal division. Asymmetric investments affect the ex-post bargaining outcome, giving an...

There is abundant evidence that many individuals violate the rationality assumptions routinely made in economics. However, powerful evidence also indicates that violations of individual rationality do not necessarily refute the aggregate predictions of standard economic models that assume full...

To overcome problems produced by globalization, some people see the solution in a World Government while others see it in an autarchic global market without any government intervention. Both solutions are rejected due to their major shortcomings. Two superior solutions are proposed: (1) A net of...