Experimental economists robustly observe that people in the laboratory regularly make choices that result in lower payoffs for themselves. When faced with this paradox of preferences, economists posit that there must be two meanings of preferences: preferences for the self and preferences for...

This article uses a laboratory experiment to examine the question of whether justice and fairness are different motivational forces in the dictator game. ‘‘Justice’’ and ‘‘fairness’’ are often used interchangeably because their meanings and usages are so closely linked, despite...

We report an experiment designed to study whether inecient rms are systematically driven from overcrowded markets. We implement a series of 3800 wars of attrition of a type modeled in Fudenberg and Tirole (1986). Exit tends to be ecient and exit times conform reasonably well to point predictions...

If, as Hume argues, property is a self-referring custom of a group of people, then property rights depend on how that group forms and orders itself. In this paper we investigate how people construct a convention for property in an experiment in which groups of self-selected individuals can...

This paper attempts to explicate the meaning of reciprocate in economics. I first show using innate universal concepts that the definition of reciprocate appears to be circular. This circularity problem vanishes, however, when the context of the interaction is introduced as the inextricable link...

Zone pricing in wholesale gasoline markets is a contentious topic in the public policy debate. With a controlled laboratory experiment, we investigate the competitive effects of zone pricing on consumers, retail stations, and refiners vis-á-vis the proposed policy prescription of uniform...

Hobbes's state of nature serves as the analytical starting point for much of what economists have written on anarchy and the formation of government. Unfortunately little historical evidence exists about how men behaved in a "state of nature", if such a situation ever even existed. We conducted...