Suchergebnisse

We investigate Schelling's hypothesis that payoff-irrelevant labels ("cues") can influence the outcomes of bargaining games with communication. In our experimental games, players negotiate over the division of a surplus by claiming valuable objects that have payoff-irrelevant spatial locations. Negotiation occurs in continuous time, constrained by a deadline. In some games, spatial cues are opposed to principles of equality or efficiency. We find a strong tendency for players to agree on efficient and minimally unequal payoff divisions, even if spatial cues suggest otherwise. But if there are two such divisions, cues are often used to select between them, inducing distributional effects. (JEL C78, D63, D83)

We present an experiment that examines three mechanisms through which the extent of inclusivity in an organization's governance arrangements might affect its performance. We distinguish extent of inclusivity along two dimensions: members of the organization may or may not be able to a) vote on collective decisions ('vote') and b) discuss with others what should be done ('voice'). We find that the inclusivity can affect performance and that each dimension of inclusivity matters, but for different decision problems within an organization. The 'voice' matters for motivation whereas 'voting' matters for processing and aggregating information; and the decisive difference for performance comes from 'voice', not 'voting'.

We test experimentally whether dynamic interaction is crucial for concession bargaining. In our complete information bargaining experiments, two parties with asymmetric conflict payoffs try to agree how to share a commonly known pie by bargaining over a finite number of successive trials (agreement attempts). We compare the fully dynamic interaction to one less dynamic and one static protocol. In the quasi-dynamic protocol, later trials merely reveal that so far no agreement has been reached, and in the static protocol, no feedback information is given about earlier trials. We find that neither conflict rate nor efficiency or inequality of agreements differs across protocols. Comparing different numbers of maximal trials shows that more trials render conflict more likely due to less concessions.