The existence of punishment opportunities has been shown to cause efficiency in public goods experiments to increase considerably. In this paper we ask whether punishment also has a downside in terms of process dissatisfaction. We conduct an experiment to study the conjecture that an environment...

Updated - please see paper 551.02 in this series. The Bank of Spain uses a unique auction format to sell government bonds, which can be seen as a hybrid of a uniform and a discriminatory auction. For winning bids above the average winning bid, buyers are charged the average winning bid,...

We study the relation between the number of firms and price-cost margins under price competition with uncertainty about competitors' costs. We present results of an experiment in which two, three and four identical firms repeatedly interact in this environment. In line with the theoretical...

We study competition in experimental markets in which two incumbents face entry by three other firms. Our treatments vary with respect to three factors: sequential vs. block or simultaneous entry, the cost functions of entrants and the amount of time during which incumbents are protected from...

Procedural fairness plays a prominent role in the social discourse concerning the marketplace in particular, and social institutions in general. Random procedures are a simple case, and they have found application in several important social allocation decisions. We investigate random procedures...

We study how personal relations affect performance in organizations. In the experimental game we use a manager has to assign different degrees of decision power to two employees. These two employees then have to make distributive decisions which affect themselves and the manager. Our focus is on...

In experiments with two-person sequential games we analyze whether responses to favorable and unfavorable actions depend on the elicitation procedure. In our “hot” treatment the second player responds to the first player’s observed action while in our “cold” treatment we follow the...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the <I>Economic Journal</I> (2014). Volume 124, pages 887-916.<P> In the process of regulatory reform in the electric power industry, the mitigation of market power is one of the basic problems regulators have to deal with. We use experimental data to...</p></i>

This paper studies behavior in experiments with a linear voluntary contributions mechanism for public goods conducted in Japan, the Netherlands, Spain and the USA. The same experimental design was used in the four countries. Our 'contribution function' design allows us to obtain a view of...

We study how the number of traders affects the interaction between a centralized exchange and bilateral negotiations in an experimental labor market with excess supply and incomplete contracts. Our large markets are three times as large as our small markets. In bilateral negotiations firms...