The higher our aspirations, the higher the probability that we have toadjust them downwards when forming more realistic expectations later on.This paper shows that the costs induced by high aspirations are not trivial.We first develop a theoretical framework to identify the factors that...

We report on an experiment designed to explore whether allowing individualsto voice their anger prevents costly punishment. For this sake, weuse an ultimatum minigame and distinguish two treatments: one in whichresponders can only accept or reject the o®er, and the other in which theycan also...

When two or more agents compete for a bonus and the agents' productivity in each of several possible occurrences depends stochastically on (constant) effort, the number of times that are checked to assign the bonus affects the level of un-certainty in the selection process. Uncertainty, in turn,...

We study the nature of dominance violations in three minimalist dominance-solvable guessing games, featuring two or three players choosing among two or three strategies. We examine how subjects’ reported reasoning translates into their choices and beliefs about others’ choices, and how...

The key element of models of contest is the Contest Success Function (CSF) which specifiesthe winning probabilities of agents. The existing axiomatizations of CSFs assume thatcontestants can make only one type of investment. This paper generalizes these axiomatizationsto the case where each...

Our objective in this paper is to assess the acceptability of the ambient tax. Concretely,we ask subjects to choose between (A) an ambient tax and (B) an individual tax system. Incase (A), they actually participate in a game in which their payout depends on all participants'decisions and on...

In this paper we experimentally test skewness seeking at the individuallevel. Several prospects that can be ordered with respect to the third-degreestochastic dominance (3SD) criterion are ranked by the participants of theexperiment. We find that the skewness of a distribution has a...

This note reports a replication study of Falk and Kosfeld’s (2006) medium control treatment.In the experimental game, an agent has an endowment of 120 experimental currency units anddecides how much to transfer to a principal. For every unit that the agent gives up, the principalreceives two...

The Shapley value of a cooperative transferable utility game distributes the dividendof each coalition in the game equally among its members. Given exogenous weightsfor all players, the corresponding weighted Shapley value distributes the dividendsproportionally to their weights. In this...

Facing a stochastic market wage, which is independent of their own hiring policy, employersoffer contracts specifying fixed wage, revenue share and employment duration.In ongoing employment relations it depends on the treatment whether fixed wages canbe only increased or also decreased. Will the...