Unanimous voting as the fundamental procedural source of political legitimacy grants vetopower to each individual. We present an axiomatic characterization of a class of biddingprocesses to spell out the underlying egalitarian values for collective projects of a“productive state”. At heart...

Whether behavior converges toward rational play or fair play in repeated ultimatum games depends on which player yields first. If responders concede first by accepting low offers, proposers would not need to learn to offer more, and play would converge toward unequal sharing. By the same token,...

In generosity games, one agreement payo is exogenously given,whereas the other is endogenously determined by the proposer's choice of the"pie" size. This has been shown to induce pie choices which are either efficiencyor equality seeking. In our experiment, before playing the generosity...

We study two person-betting games with inconsistent commonly know beliefs, using an experimentalapproach. In our experimental games, participants bet against one another, each bettorchoosing one of two possible outcomes, and payoff odds are know at the time bets are placed.Bettors’ beliefs are...

Die menschliche Art ist eine Spezies, die durch Einsatz von Institutionen undNormensystemen kollektive Güter (oder Übel) bereitzustellen vermag.1 Kollektive Güterbilden typischerweise Antworten auf Kollektivgut-Probleme. Eine besonders wichtige Klassesolcher Kollektivgut-Probleme entsteht im...

Unlike previous attempts to implement cooperation in a prisoners’ dilemma gamewith an infinite horizon in the laboratory, we focus on extended prisoners’ dilemmagames in which a second (pure strategy) equilibrium allows for voluntary cooperationin all but the last round. Our four main...

During the last three decades the ascent of behavioral economics clearly helped tobring down artificial disciplinary boundaries between psychology and economics.Noting that behavioral economics seems still under the spell of the rational choicetradition – and, indirectly, of behaviorism – we...

Relying on the specific example of ultimatum bargaining experiments this paperexplores the possible role of empirical knowledge of behavioural “norm(ative)facts” within the search for (W)RE – (Wide) Reflective Equilibria on normativeissues. Assuming that “pro-social” behaviour...

We study interaction effects between intra-firm conflicts and interfirm competitionon a duopolistic market with seller firms employing one or more agents and imple-menting tournament incentives. We show that inter-firm competition leads to higherincentive intensity, higher efforts and output...

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...