This paper investigates the optimality of international income transfers in a two-country model in which each country engages in non-cooperative trade policy behaviour. It is shown that unconditional income transfers can never be optimal for the donor country, which not only suffers the loss of...

In a bribery experiment, we test the hypothesis that distributive fairness considerations make relatively well-paid public officials less corruptible. Corrupt decisions impose damages to workers whose wage is varied in two treatments. However, there is no apparent difference in behaviour.

The paper presents the concept of an imitation equilibrium and explores it in the context of some simple oligopoly models. The concept applies to normal form games enriched by a reference structure specifying a reference group for every player. The reference group is a set of other players, whom...

The theory of melioration, originally formulated for individual decision-making contexts, is formally extended to a game theoretic framework. This paper proves the existence of a distribution that is a melioration strategy on the part of all players. Further, the question of stability of such a...

Das fundamentale Werk von John von Neumann und Oskar Morgenstern (1944) hat die Spieltheorie als Gebiet begründet. Es gab zwar vorher schon den in deutscher Sprache veröffentlichen Beitrag von John Neumann (1928) Zur Theorie der Gesellschaftsspiele, aber erst mit dem Buch aus dem Jahre 1944...

In public procurement a temporal separation of award and actual contracting can frequently be observed. In this paper we give an explanation for this institutional setting. For incomplete procurement contracts we show that such a separation may increase efficiency. We show that efficiency can be...

In this paper, we combine the strategic delegation approach of Fershtman-Judd-Sklivas with contets. The results show that besides a symmetric equilibrium there also exist asymmetric equilibria in which one owner induces pure sales maximization to his manager so that all the other firms drop out...

We report an experiment that uses the strategy method (Selten 1967) to elicit subjects' general strategy for playing any 2-person 3x3-game with integer payoffs between 0 and 99. Each two subjects' strategies play 500000 games in each of the 5 tournaments. For games with pure strategy equilibria...

The purpose of this paper is twofold. We first develop a contractarian theory of redistribution. The existence of rules of redistribution is explained without any recourse to the risk-aversion of individuals. Hence, we depart from the standard legitimization of redistribution as fundamental...

Recently there has been much theoretical and experimental work on learning in games. However, learning usually means learning about the strategic behavior of opponents rather than learning about the game as such. In contrast, here we report on an experiment designed to test whether players learn...