This paper analyses vertical cross-shareholding, that is, the mutual holding of a minority of shares between vertically related firms. We investigate the conditions under which cross-shareholding improves efficiency. First, we explore the issue in a game-theoretic model and find that...

If the (un)trustworthy are rare, people will talk about them, making their detection more reliable and / or less costly. When, however, both types appear in large numbers, detecting (un)trustworthiness will be considerably more difficult and possibly too costly. Based on Güth and Kliemt (2000)...

Zusammenfassung: In diesem Beitrag lassen wir herkömmliche Kritikpunkte an der ökonomischen Neo-Klassik Revue passieren und untersuchen, inwieweit die heutige experimentelle Ökonomik diesen durch gesteigerte Realwissenschaftlichkeit entgeht. Eine induktive Vorgehensweise, bei der im Labor...

We study an ultimatum experiment in which the responder does not know the offer when accepting or rejecting. Unconditional veto power leads to acceptances, although proposers are significantly greedier than in standard ultimatum games, and this is anticipated by responders.

Two firms, each consisting of a team with the owner and just one employee, compete on the labor market with free labor mobility. After observing the investment decisions by firm owners their employees can engage in costly training, thus increasing their general and firm-specific productivity,...

The common prior assumption justifies private beliefs as posterior probabilities when updating a common prior based on individual information. Common priors are pervasive in most economic models of incomplete information and oligopoly models with asymmetrically informed firms. We dispose of the...

The indirect evolutionary approach integrates forward-looking evaluation of opportunities and adaptation in the light of the past. Subjective motivation determines behavior, but long-run evolutionary success of motivational types depends on objective factors only. This can justify intrinsic...

Fairness like other social norms is usually stabilized by punishing norm deviations. Reward uncertainty, however, questions whether norm deviations can be detected and thus punished. By investing in information acquisition, a responder in an ultimatum experiment determines endogenously whether...

In plausible theories of bounded rationality actors are not stimulus-response machines but human beings. As such they are guided by theories that predict the course of the world and prescribe how they should try to intervene in that course. Since boundedly rational human beings cannot only...