Lab Labor: What Can Labor Economists Learn from the Lab?

This paper surveys the contributions of laboratory experiments to labor economics. We begin with a discussion of methodological issues: why (and when) is a lab experiment the best approach; how do laboratory experiments compare to field experiments; and what are the main design issues? We then summarize the substantive contributions of laboratory experiments to our understanding of principal-agent interactions, social preferences, union-firm bargaining, arbitration, gender differentials, discrimination, job search, and labor markets more generally

Pirates of the Mediterranean: An empirical investigation of bargaining with asymmetric information

We investigate the effect of delay on prices in bargaining situations using a data set containing thousands of captives ransomed from Barbary pirates between 1575 and 1692. Plausibly exogenous variation in the delay in ransoming provides evidence that negotiating delays decreased the size of ransom payments, and that much of the effect stems from the signalling value of strategic delay, in accordance with theoretical predictions. We also structurally estimate a version of the screening type bargaining model, adjusted to our context, and find that the model fits both the observed prices and acceptance probabilities well

The Impact of Compulsory Arbitration on Bargaining Behavior: An Experimental Study

Bargaining, Arbitration, Experiments, Fair Awards, C78, C91, D63,