US power ‘elites’ are substantially less fair-minded than ‘non-elite’ general populations claims a study by Ray Fisman and coauthors [Science 349, 6254 (2015)]. This supposedly explains why US governments, run by people less fair than the citizens they represent, have been uninclined to...

Experimental implementations of dictator games are found to differ in terms of their underlying strategic incentives. We explore this discovery in two separate directions. Theoretically, assuming identical other-regarding preferences, we show that the two most widely used protocols can generate...

The European Commission has proposed a refugee distribution key, which yields respective quotas for EU/EFTA member states. It is based on four quantities: GDP, population, asylum applications per capita in the past, and unemployment rates. We show that the given distribution key has properties...

We analyze the problem of dividing a fixed amount of a single commodity between two players on the basis of the Nash Bargaining Solution (NBS). For one-shot negotiations, a cornerstone result of Roth (1989) establishes that the more risk averse player will obtain less than half the total amount....

We propose a new family of mechanisms, whereby players may give more or less directly to one another. A corner case is the regular linear public goods mechanism (LPGM), where all contribute into a single common group account, the total amount of which is then distributed equally among players....

Doctrinal lawyers strive to reduce legal uncertainty based on the premise that difficult to predict legal consequences discourage socially desirable activities. Contributions from the economic theory of law suggest that increasing legal uncertainty can be socially beneficial. We test in an...