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...

In a stochastic duopoly market, sellers must form state-specific aspirationsexpressing how much they want to earn given their expectationsabout the other's behavior. We define individually and mutually satisficingsales behavior for given individual beliefs and aspiration profiles. In afirst...

There is robust field data showing that a frequent and successful way of looking fora job is via the intermediation of friends and relatives. Here we want to explore thisexperimentally. Participants first play a simple public good game with two interactionpartners ("friends"), and share whatever...

In this paper we consider conventions as regularities in behavior which help to solve coordinationproblems in a society. These problems can be formalized as non-cooperative games with severalequilibria. We know that in such situations serious problems of equilibrium selection arise whichcannot...

Taking seriously the philosophical foundations of classical strategic theories of choice-making we scrutinize to what extent planning on on equilibrium strategies can be justified "eductively" among rational players and how this can be utilized to analyze games by their "game-like"...

The variable threat-bargaining model of Nash (1953) assumes that threats in the senseof binding commitments as to what one will do if bargaining ends in conflict, are chosenbefore bargaining. By comparison, late threats to be chosen after bargaining end in conflict,appear more natural and would...

This paper focuses on the uneasy alliance of rational choice and evolutionary explanations in modern economics. While direct evolutionary explanations of "optimality" rule out "purposeful" rational choice by assuming zero-intelligence and pure rational choice explanations leave no room for...

If the future market wage is uncertain, engaging in long–term employment is risky, with the risk depending on how regulated the labor market is. In our experiment long–term employment can result either from offering long–term contracts or from repeatedly and mutually opting for...