Experimental research in economics relies on performance-dependent monetary incentives to implement theoretical games in the laboratory. While the set of players and the set of strategies of those games are unambiguously defined and controlled by the experimenter, utility is typically either assumed to coincide with monetary payoffs or is estimated ex post based on observed actions. We follow a different path and discuss results from an experiment on simple 2-person games in which participants were repeatedly asked to report their expectations on the opponent's behavior and their own level of satisfaction for each possible outcome of the game. This approach allows us to reflect on experimental methodology by directly comparing monetary incentives with (perceived and declared) utility. We find that, albeit helpful, repetition and experience are unable to completely align utility with monetary incentives. While most participants (57%) seek to maximize money earnings in the experimental laboratory and tend to perceive the games in the intended way, a small – yet non-negligible – fraction (27%) of the subject pool consistently interprets the game and, therefore, acts in an unexpected way.

We report experimental results on voluntary contributions to public-goods provision from situations in which parties can create institutions to impose a certain contribution level on its members. We focus on a public-goods game where the joint decisions inside the institution are made based on the plurality voting rule. We show that, comparing to the unanimity voting rule, the plurality rule results in a significant and large decrease in the institution initiation rate, along with a significant and large increase in the institution implementation rate. In the end, as the two effects cancel each other out, the choice of the voting rule does not significantly affect the average contribution level or efficiency.

Policy makers use several international indices that characterize countries according to the quality of their institutions. However, no effort has been made to study how the honesty of citizens varies across countries. This paper explores the honesty among citizens across 16 countries with 1440 participants. We employ a very simple task where participants face a trade-off between the joy of eating a fine chocolate and the disutility of having a threatened self-concept because of lying. Despite the incentives to cheat, we find that individuals are mostly honest. Further, international indices that are indicative of institutional honesty are completely uncorrelated with citizens' honesty for our sample countries. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

This article proposes a simple mechanism that can be operated without monetary transfers in situations where a group of agents have to decide over a series of common projects and they are not informed about each other’s valuations. It is shown that efficient public decisions can be made by aggregating the standardized values of the declared individual valuations if the number of agents and the number of decision problems are sufficiently large.

We report empirical results related to trust and trustworthiness based on a representative web survey carried out in March 2011 in Japan. Although it initially was intended as a pilot, our survey is unique and unrepeatable because the massive Tohoku earthquake that hit Japan in spring 2011 occurred during the data-collection process and created a natural experiment. Apart from exploring changes originated by the disaster, the novelty of our approach lies in using a multipurpose questionnaire assembled by researchers with diverse interests from different academic areas that allows for exploring political and other social correlates of the economic concepts of trust and trustworthiness as measured by the game-theoretical trust game.

Experimental subjects usually self-select to the laboratory and this may introduce a bias to the conclusions derived from observing their behavior. We analyze data stored by a subject-pool management program at an experimental laboratory and speculate ate about the effect of individual decisions on returning. Specifically, we test whether experience and earnings in previous sessions together with demographic variables explain the decision to return to the laboratory. We find that males and (in monetary terms) well-performing subjects are more likely to participate in experiments again. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

This note reflects on the key parameter of the popular logistic quantal-response equilibrium in order to set some common guidelines on its empirical interpretation. It is stressed that the estimated model must be in harmony with the experimental design, because the estimation results on mu prove to be sensitive to changes in the strategy sets of players even if those are unimportant from a game-theoretic point of view. It is also shown that a simple post-estimation correction of mu can help inter-game comparisons, while pre-estimation treatments of the data may introduce unwanted biases.

Three well-known matching mechanisms designed to solve the college admissions problems are analyzed in the experimental laboratory in different informational settings. We observe that when the level of information is significantly increased, the proportion of schools and teachers that submit their true preferences decreases. This affects largely the efficiency and stability of the Gale-Shapley and the Boston mechanisms. The TTC mechanism is less sensitive to information and outperforms the other two mechanisms in terms of efficiency and stability, and it is as successful as them in extracting private information.

We study team formation in real-effort experiments in which participants bargain over a jointly produced outcome. Participants decide between undertaking a task alone or with another participant by releasing the minimum share of the future team outcome that they are willing to accept. We find that the equality norm prevails in a context in which merit could play an important role. The inability of high-ability individuals to claim a large share of the joint profits makes the dissolution of inefficient teams difficult, and results in unprofitable cooperation. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Due to its simplicity, the plurality voting system is frequently used to choose a common representative or project. Nevertheless, it may fail to provide a socially efficient decision as the majority can outvote any minority, even if the majority's gain does not compensate the loss suffered by the minority. In this paper, we propose and study a voting mechanism that allows voters to reveal more information about their preferences than the plurality voting system. In the standardized bids mechanism voters report a bid for all available projects that are standardized before being aggregated to choose the winning project. The standardization of bids ensures the existence of an equilibrium, and delivers incentives to overcome the problem of positive and negative exaggeration. Our experimental results show that the standardized bids mechanism performs well in the laboratory as it chooses the efficient project in almost 70% of the cases, and induces truthful reports of project rankings in approximately 90% of the cases. It also reduces the tension between the majority and the minority. (c) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

We examine the minutes of the executive committees of two Basque firms in the iron and steel industry, Altos Hornos de Bilbao and Vizcaya, to discuss the relevance of different factors on the survival and failure of the collusive agreements reached in the industry from 1886 to 1901. We observe intense communication among colluding parties during and after collusive arrangements. Collusion seems to be more likely to break down in periods of falling demand, while strong demand provides these agreements with stability. Additionally, the presence of centralized sales agencies, and similar degrees of vertical integration among colluding firms facilitate collusion.

[Perez-Castrillo, D., Wettstein, D., 2002. Choosing wisely: a multibidding approach. American Economic Review 5, 1577-1587.] and [Veszteg, R.F., 2004. Multibidding game under uncertainty. Working paper 14/04. Universidad de Navarra.] propose the use of a multibidding mechanism for situations where agents have to choose a common project. Examples are decisions involving public goods (or public "bads"). We report experimental results that test the practical tractability and effectiveness of multibidding mechanisms in environments where agents hold private information concerning their valuation of the projects. The mechanism performed quite well in the laboratory, providing the ex post efficient outcome in roughly three quarters of the cases across the treatments; moreover, the largest part of the subject pool formed their bids according to theoretical bidding behavior. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.