Student volunteers at the U.S. Naval Academy (USNA) participated in one of the following oneshot games: a dictator game, an ultimatum game, a trust game, or a prisoner's dilemma game. We find limited support for the importance of personality type for explaining subjects' decisions. With controls for personality preferences, we find little evidence of behavioral differences between males and females. Furthermore, we conclude that seniority breeds feelings of entitlement -seniors at USNA generally exhibited the least cooperative or other-regarding behavior.

This paper develops and experimentally tests a model in which a player’s effort affects the probability of winning a contest in both the current and future periods. Theory predicts that rent-seeking effort will be shifted forward from later to earlier periods, with no change in overall rent-seeking expenditures relative to the static contest. Experimental results indicate a significant shift forward when “carryover” is present and that the amount shifted is directly related to the carryover rate. Finally, although experimental expenditures are greater than the equilibrium predictions, overall rent-seeking effort in the carryover contests is lower than in similar static contests. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin/Heidelberg 2004Rent-seeking, multi-period games, experimental tests,

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When an economic exchange requires agreement by multiple independent parties, the potential exists for an individual to strategically delay agreement in an attempt to capture a greater share of the surplus created by the exchange. This "holdout problem" is a common feature of the land assembly literature because development frequently requires the assembly of multiple parcels of land. We use experimental methods to examine holdout behavior in a laboratory bargaining game that involves multi-person groups, complementary exchanges, and holdout externalities. The results of six treatments that vary the bargaining institution, number of bargaining periods, and the cost of delay demonstrate that holdout is common across institutions and is, on average, a payoff-improving strategy for responders. Both proposers and responders take a more aggressive initial bargaining stance in multi-period bargaining treatments relative to single-period treatments, but take a less aggressive bargaining stance when delay is costly. Nearly all exchanges eventually occur in our multi-period treatments, leading to higher overall efficiency relative to the single-period treatments, both with and without delay costs.