In legislative bargaining, the proposer is often able to extract a greater proportion of the surplus. However, a higher likelihood of being selected as the proposer can backfire, as it may reduce the probability that the agent is included in a winning coalition. We experimentally test the theoretical prediction of potentially negative returns to recognition probability in two-period legislative bargaining noted in Baron and Ferejohn (1989). We find that higher recognition probability benefits subjects in all treatments, except one in which we automate the second period. It is because proposers often favor the member with the greater recognition probability as a coalition partner, and such tendency varies depending on the proposer’s recognition probability, counter to the theoretical prediction. In all treatments, a vast majority of subjects exhibit a strict preference for higher recognition probability.

Democracy relies on citizens who are politically knowledgeable and engaged. However, when a voter gains political knowledge regarding important issues, through television, town halls, or social media, she also learns that there are many other politically knowledgeable voters, highlighting the importance of social knowledge in political participation. Will a voter with concrete—as opposed to hypothetical—knowledge about other voters’ political knowledge have an increased incentive to participate? Or instead, will concrete social knowledge about other voters actually inhibit participation? In this article, we develop a novel experimental design that focuses on whether concrete knowledge about other voters’ political knowledge influences political participation. Our main result shows that concrete social knowledge decreases individual voters’ willingness to vote, and thereby reduces the probability democracy chooses the majority preferred alternative, i.e. the quality of democratic choice.

One argument against secret ballots is that such procedures lead to more selfish voting behavior and that public voting can increase prosocial voting and the likelihood of prosocial outcomes when voters are not subject to intimidation and coercion from outside interests. We investigate this supposition as well as voter preferences over observability in voting in this context. We find that voters are significantly more likely to choose unselfishly when voting is public. These differences in behavior advantage prosocial choices in elections (by 27%) when voting is public. Moreover, voters appear to recognize these differences and a substantial minority of voters whose selfish preference is not the prosocial choice willingly choose public voting even though the likely outcome will be costly to themselves.

This article examines how the presentation of information during a laboratory experiment can alter a study’s findings. We compare four possible ways to present information about hypothetical candidates in a laboratory experiment. First, we manipulate whether subjects experience a low-information or a high-information campaign. Second, we manipulate whether the information is presented statically or dynamically. We find that the design of a study can produce very different conclusions. Using candidate’s gender as our manipulation, we find significant effects on a variety of candidate evaluation measures in low-information conditions, but almost no significant effects in high-information conditions. We also find that subjects in high-information settings tend to seek out more information in dynamic environments than static, though their ultimate candidate evaluations do not differ. Implications and recommendations for future avenues of study are discussed.

Utilizing a simplified version of the Meltzer–Richard redistribution mechanism, we designed a laboratory experiment to test whether it matters if voters were asked to decide on a tax rate or a minimum income, leaving the redistribution mechanism itself unchanged. Framing the vote about redistribution as a decision about a minimal income increases the individually and ideally preferred level of redistribution. This effect outlives the groups’ deliberation processes and leads to the implementation of a higher level of redistribution.

We evaluate the claim that bottle size formats signal quality changes by performing a controlled laboratory experiment in which we simultaneously auction two different sweet wines: a pomegranate wine and a grape wine. We vary the size of the bottle from 500 mL to 750 mL between participants, but we keep the amount of wine constant across the bottle sizes. We also explore the effect of expectations for the wines, blind tasting, and information about wine attributes on people's willingness to pay (WTP). For both wines, we find evidence consistent with diminishing marginal utility; for the pomegranate wine, we find a premium for the smaller bottle size, which is consistent with changes in the wine's perceived quality. We also find that information is adequate in offsetting the negative effect of the tasting treatment. (JEL Classifications: C23, C24, C91, D12, M31)

Spatial committee decision-making experiments provide ample evidence for the predictive power of the majority rule core if it is not empty. Furthermore, an empty core does not substantively reduce the stability of majority decision making. In this article, I put these two findings to a critical test using two preference configurations from Fiorina's and Plott's (1978) seminal committee experiments. In my experiment, committees with fixed individual preferences make multiple decisions over time. Contrary to the existing evidence, I find that results diverge from the core in the course of the experiment. In line with previous research, an empty core has no noticeable behavioral effects.

Can governments increase tax compliance by rewarding honest taxpayers? We conducted a controlled laboratory experiment comparing tax compliance under a “deterrence” baseline with tax compliance under two “reward” treatments: a “donation” treatment giving taxpayers a say in the spending purposes of their payments and a “lucky” treatment giving taxpayers the (highly unlikely) chance of winning a lottery. The reward treatments significantly affected tax behaviour but not in a straightforward manner. Although female participants altered their behaviour as expected and complied somewhat more, men strongly reacted in the opposite manner: they evaded a much higher percentage of taxes than under the baseline. Apparently, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to boost tax compliance.

This paper reports an experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of repeated interactions in deterring leaders from using divide-and-conquer strategies to extract surplus from their subordinates, when every decision-maker involved is a group instead of an individual. We find that both the resistance rate by subordinates and the divide-and-conquer transgression rate by leaders are the same in the group and individual repeated coordinated resistance games. Similar to the individual game, adding communication to the group game can help deter opportunistic behavior by the leaders even in the presence of repetition.

I investigate the extent to which reputational incentives affect policy choices in the context of a controlled laboratory experiment. In theory, asymmetric information and outcome unobservability undermine electoral delegation by creating incentives for politicians to pander. Under the right conditions, it may be preferable to remove such incentives by removing accountability altogether. The data suggest that subjects playing the role of politicians fail to take advantage of voters even though voters indeed create the predicted electoral incentives, albeit in a weaker form than predicted by the theory. When given the choice of institutions via a novel elicitation method, subjects prefer to retain electoral accountability or to make decisions themselves through direct democracy, even though both institutions yield lower expected payoffs than delegation to unaccountable agents.