Costly Renegotiation in Repeated Bertrand Games

This paper extends the concept of weak renegotiation-proof equilibrium (WRP) to allow for costly renegotiation and shows that even small renegotiation costs can have dramatic effects on the set of equilibria. More specifically, the paper analyzes the infinitely repeated Bertrand game. It is shown that for every level of renegotiation cost there exists a discount factor such that any collusive profit can be supported as an equilibrium outcome. Hence, any arbitrary small renegotiation cost will suffice to facilitate collusive outcomes for sufficiently patient firms. This result stands in stark contrast to the unique pure-strategy WRP equilibrium without renegotiation costs, which implies marginal-cost pricing in every period. Moreover, in comparison to the findings of McCutcheon (1997), who states that renegotiation costs have to be substantial to facilitate collusion, this result points to a quite different conclusion.Noncooperative game theory; Weak Renegotiation-proofness; Costly Renegotation; Repeated Bertrand games

Credible Communication and Cooperation: Experimental Evidence from Multi-stage Games

It is well known that communication often serves as a facilitator for cooperation in static games. Yet, communication can serve entirely different purposes in dynamic settings as communication during the game may work as a means for renegotiation, potentially undermining the credibility of cooperative strategies. To explore this issue, this paper experimentally investigates cooperation and non-binding communication in a two-stage game. More specifically, two treatments are considered: one with only pre-play communication and one where subjects can also communicate intra-play between the stages of the game. The results highlight a nontrivial difference concerning the effects of pre-play communication between the two treatments. Pre-play communication only has a significant impact on cooperation when no intra-play communication is possible. The results suggest that the credibility of pre-play messages may depend crucially on future communication opportunities.Communication; Cooperation; Renegotiation; Experiments

Fast or Fair? A Study of Response Times

This paper uses a modified dictator game to investigate the relationship between response times and social preferences. We find that egoistic subjects make faster decisions than subjects with social preferences. Moreover, our within-analysis reveals that, for a given individual, egoistic payoff maximizing decisions are reached quicker than choices expressing social preferences.response times; social preferences

Price competition, level-k theory and communication

This paper analyzes communication in a price competition game using the level-$k$ theory of bounded rationality. The level-k analysis predicts prices to be higher with communication than without. Our experimental evidence lends support to the view that communication affects subjects in a way that is compatible with the level-k model, indicating that people lie in order to fool other players that they believe do less thinking. Moreover, the results indicate that the predictive power of the level-k model does crucially depend on the possibility for high level players to form homogenous beliefs about the behavior of the level-0 player

Microfoundations of Social Capital

We show that the standard trust question routinely used in social capital research is importantly related to cooperation behavior and we provide evidence on the microfoundation of this relation. We run a large-scale public goods experiment over the internet in Denmark using a design that enables us to disentangle preferences for cooperation from beliefs about others’ cooperation. We find that the standard trust question is a proxy for cooperation preferences rather than beliefs about others’ cooperation. Moreover, we show that the “fairness question”, a recently proposed alternative to the standard trust question, is also related to cooperation behavior but operates through beliefs rather than preferences.Social capital, Trust, Fairness, Public goods, Cooperation, Experiment

Risk and Cooperation : Experimental Evidence from Stochastic Public Good Games

Outcomes in social dilemmas often have a stochastic component. We report experimental findings from public good games with both correlated and independent risk across players. We find that the presence of both types of risk prevents the decay of cooperation typically observed in the standard deterministic public good game. The results further suggest that it is greater relative importance of social norms or warm glow giving, rather than risk sharing opportunities that foster cooperation in our stochastic public good game

Heterogeneity in Risky Choice Behaviour in a Broad Population

We analyse risk preferences using an experiment with real incentives in a representative sample of 1,422 Dutch respondents. Our econometric model incorporates four structural parameters that vary with observed and unobserved characteristics: Utility curvature, loss aversion, preferences towards the timing of uncertainty resolution, and the propensity to choose randomly rather than on the basis of preferences. We find that all four parameters contribute to explaining choice behaviour. The structural parameters are significantly associated with socio-economic variables, but it is essential to incorporate unobserved heterogeneity in each of them to match the rich variety of choice patterns in the data.risk aversion, loss aversion, uncertainty resolution, field experiments

Selection and Mode Effects in Risk Preference Elicitation Experiments

We combine data from a risk preference elicitation experiment conducted on a representative sample via the Internet with laboratory data on students for the same experiment to investigate effects of implementation mode and of subject pool selection. We find that the frequency of errors in the lab experiment is drastically below that of the representative sample in the Internet experiment, and average risk aversion is also lower. Considering the student-like subsample of the Internet subjects and comparing a traditional lab design with an Internet-like design in the lab gives two ways to decompose these differences into differences due to subject pool selection and differences due to implementation mode. Both lead to the conclusion that the differences are due to selection and not implementation mode. An analysis of the various steps leading to participation or non-participation in the Internet survey leads shows that these processes are selective in selecting subjects who make fewer errors, but do not lead to biased conclusions on risk preferences. These findings point at the usefulness of the Internet survey as an alternative to a student pool in the laboratory if the ambition is to use the experiments to draw inference on a broad population.risk aversion, internet surveys, laboratory experiments