We present a model where divorcing spouses can choose to hire lawyers in their divorce process. Spouses encounter incentives as in the classical prisoners' dilemma: Despite the zero sum nature of the game and the lawyers' fees, each spouse has an incentive to hire a lawyer. We propose a simple...

For several years, an increasing number of firms are investing in Open Source Software (OSS). While improvements in such a non- excludable public good cannot be appropriated, companies can benefit indirectly in a complementary proprietary segment. We study this incentive for investment in OSS....

We analyse the effect of the uncertainty about the fundamentals on the probability of sudden stops of capital flows from a theoretical and empirical perspective. Our model predicts that the probability of crises increases with the uncertainty, ie. the dispersion of private signals about the true...

This paper analyzes the impact of uncertainty on the spread of stock market crises, both theoretically and empirically. The effect of uncertainty about the fundamentals on investment decisions is an important cause of financial crises propagating across countries. Firstly, a coordination game on...

This paper examines the influence of third-party observation and third-party reward on behavior in an experimental prisoner's dilemma (PD) game. Whereas the existing literature on third-party intervention as a means to sustain social norms has dealt almost exclusively with third-party...

We compare the behavior of car mechanics and college students as sellers in experimental credence goods markets. Finding largely similar behavior, we note much more overtreatment by car mechanics, probably due to decision heuristics they learned in their professional training.

We present an experiment on strategic thinking and behavior of individuals and teams in one-shot normal-form games. Besides making choices, decision makers have to state their first- and second-order beliefs. We find that teams play the Nash strategy significantly more often, and their choices...

We investigate how group boundaries, and the economic environment surrounding groups, affect altruistic cooperation and punishment behavior. Our study uses experiments conducted with 525 officers in the Swiss Army, and exploits random assignment to platoons. We find that, without competition...

In a duopoly market, aspiration levels express how much sellers want to earn given their expectations about the other's behavior. We augment the sellers' decision task by eliciting their profit aspiration. In a first experimental phase, whenever satisficing is not possible, sales choices, point...

This paper studies an evolutionary model of network formation with endogenous decay, in which agents benefit both from direct and indirect connections. In addition to forming (costly) links, agents choose actions for a coordination game that determines the level of decay of each link. We address...