HOW DO MARKETS MANAGE WATER RESOURCES? AN EXPERIMENT ON RESOURCE MARKET (DE) CENTRALIZATION WITH ENDOGENOUS QUALITY.

We test how a monopoly, a duopoly and a public monopoly manage and allocate water resources. Stock depletion for the public monopoly is fastest. However, it reaches the optimal stock level towards the end of the experimental sessions. The private monopoly and duopoly maintain inefficiently high levels of stock throughout the sessions. The average quality to price ratio offered by the public monopoly is substantially higher than that offered by the private monopoly or duopoly. A clear result from the experiments is that a public monopoly offers the highest (average) quality to price ratio and has the fastest rate of stock depletion compared to a private monopoly or duopoly.

Adaptive behavior by single-product and multiproduct price setting firms in experimental markets

We focus on the learning dynamics in multiproduct price-setting markets, where firms use past strategies and performance to adapt to the corresponding equilibrium

An Experiment on Prisoner’s Dilemma with Confirmed Proposals

We apply an alternating proposals protocol with a confirmation stage as a way of solving a Prisoner’s Dilemma game. We interpret players’ proposals and (no) confirmation of outcomes of the game as a tacit communication device. The protocol leads to unprecedented high levels of cooperation in the laboratory. Assigning the power of confirmation to one of the two players alone, rather than alternating the role of a leader significantly increases the probability of signing a cooperative agreement in the first bargaining period. We interpret pre-agreement strategies as tacit messages on players’ willingness to cooperate and on their beliefs about the others’ type.Prisoner’s Dilemma; Bargaining; Confirmed Proposals; Confirmed Agreement; Tacit Communication.

Corruption and individual ethics: insights from a public procurement auction

This article proposes an auction model where two firms compete for obtaining the license for a public project and an auctioneer acting as a public official representing the political power, decides the winner of the contest. Players as firms face a social dilemma in the sense that the higher is the bribe offered, the higher would be the willingness of a pure monetary maximizer public official to give her the license. However, it implies inducing a cost of reducing all players’ payoffs as far as our model includes an endogenous externality, which depends on bribe. All players’ payoffs decrease with the bribe (and increase with higher quality). We find that the presence of bribe aversion in either the officials’ or the firms’ utility function shifts equilibrium towards more pro-social behavior. When the quality and bribe-bid strategy space is discrete, multiple equilibria emerge including more pro-social bids than would be predicted under a continuous strategy space

An Experiment on Prisoner’s Dilemma with Confirmed Proposals

We apply an alternating proposals protocol with a confirmation stage as a way of solving a Prisoner’s Dilemma game. We interpret players’ proposals and (no) confirmation of outcomes of the game as a tacit communication device. The protocol leads to unprecedented high levels of cooperation in the laboratory. Assigning the power of confirmation to one of the two players alone, rather than alternating the role of a leader significantly increases the probability of signing a cooperative agreement in the first bargaining period. We interpret pre-agreement strategies as tacit messages on players’ willingness to cooperate and on their beliefs about the others’ type

An Experiment on Prisoner’s Dilemma with Confirmed Proposals

We apply an alternating proposals protocol with a confirmation stage as a way of solving a Prisoner’s Dilemma game. We interpret players’ proposals and (no) confirmation of outcomes of the game as a tacit communication device. The protocol leads to unprecedented high levels of cooperation in the laboratory. Assigning the power of confirmation to one of the two players alone, rather than alternating the role of a leader significantly increases the probability of signing a cooperative agreement in the first bargaining period. We interpret pre-agreement strategies as tacit messages on players’ willingness to cooperate and on their beliefs about the others’ type

Non-cooperative games with chained confirmed proposals

We propose a bargaining process with alternating proposals as a way of solving non-cooperative games, giving rise to Pareto efficient agreements which will, in general, differ from the Nash equilibrium of the constituent games

An Experiment on Prisoner’s Dilemma with Confirmed Proposals

We apply an alternating proposals protocol with a confirmation stage as a way of solving a Prisoner’s Dilemma game. We interpret players’ proposals and (no) confirmation of outcomes of the game as a tacit communication device. The protocol leads to unprecedented high levels of cooperation in the laboratory. Assigning the power of confirmation to one of the two players alone, rather than alternating the role of a leader significantly increases the probability of signing a cooperative agreement in the first bargaining period. We interpret pre-agreement strategies as tacit messages on players’ willingness to cooperate and on their beliefs about the others’ type

Bias and size effects of price-comparison platforms: theory and experimental evidence

We analyze the impact on consumer prices of some information characteristics of price comparison search platforms. An equilibrium model where vendors compete in prices and consumers do not observe prices, but can obtain price information through a search platform, is developed. The model generates several predictions about the impact on the price distribution of: (i) the size of the search platform’s sample, (ii) whether the search platform’s sample is random, and (iii) the number of vendors in the market. The model’s predictions are tested experimentally. The results confirm the predictions about (ii) and (iii), but reject the model’s predictions about (i)

Food Norms and Preferences in Schools: is there Pluralistic Ignorance?

We use behavioural games to identify preferences, beliefs about others’ preferences, and higher-order beliefs, amongst adolescents at a UK comprehensive school. Pupils systematically under-rate the attractiveness of ‘healthy’, and over-rate that of ‘unhealthy’, foods. The bias is consistently in the direction of higher-order beliefs. Pluralistic ignorance would explain much of the results and seems clearly instantiated in one case