Human decision making is a process guided by different and partly competing mo-tivations that can each dominate behavior and lead to different effects depending on strength and circumstances. “Over-stylizing” neglects such competing concerns and context-dependence, although it facilitates...

In line with the widely applied principle of just deserts, we assume that the severityof the penalty on a contract offender increases in the harm on the other. Whenthis principle holds, the influence of the efficiency of the agreement on the incentivesto abide by it crucially depends on whether...

One may hope to capture the behavioral and emotional eects of downsizingthe labor force in rather abstract settings as an ultimatum game (see Fischeret al. (2008)), or try to explore downsizing in its more natural principalagentscenario with a labor market background. We pursue the latter...

In the experimental scenario several agents repeatedly invest in n (n _ 2)state-specic assets. The evolutionarily stable and equilibrium (Blume andEasley, 1992) portfolio for this situation requires to distribute funds accordingto the constant probabilities of the various states. The dierent...

The satisficing approach is generalized and applied to finite n-person games.Based on direct elicitation of aspirations, we formally define the conceptof satisficing, which does not exclude (prior-free) optimality but includesit as a border case. We also review some experiments on strategic...

Charness et al. (2007b) have shown that group membership has a strong effect on individualdecisions in strategic games when group membership is salient through payoff commonality.In this comment I show that their findings also apply to non-strategic decisions, even when nooutgroup exists, and I...

On a heterogeneous experimental oligopoly market, sellers choose a price,specify a set-valued prior-free conjecture about the others' behavior, andform their own profit-aspiration for each element of their conjecture. Weformally define the concepts of satisficing and prior-free optimality...

As firms implement tournament bonus reward schemes, mainly the idea is to introduce competition amongst their agents in the order to promote their performance.Tournaments in which agents compete for a bonus by investing effort, are frequentlyapplied, e.g., in development races, political...

In this paper, we experimentally test the Modigliani-Miller theorem. Applying ageneral equilibrium approach and not allowing for arbitrage among ¯rms with differ-ent capital structure, we are able to address a question fundamental to the valuationof firms: does capital structure affect the...

Similar to welfare economics where with(out) interpersonal comparisonsone defines unique (set-valued) welfare (Pareto) optima, we present a frameworkfor one-person decision making where with(out) a prior probability distributionindividual optimality prescribes usually a unique (set of)...