Numerous laboratory experiments show that workers reciprocate to high wages with high effort, when there is perfect information on the surplus created. Recent field experiments, however, suggest that trust and reciprocity may be lower – or absent – when the information is incomplete. We report a laboratory experiment with symmetric and asymmetric incomplete surplus information in a “bilateral g...

We investigate, in a simple bilateral bargaining environment, the extent to which asymmetric information can induce individuals to engage in exchange where trade is not mutually profitable. We first establish a no-trade theorem for this environment. A laboratory experiment is conducted, where trade is found to occur between 16% and 32% of the time, depending on the specific details of the envir...

Negotiation skills are essential in everyday life, whether in a professional or personal context. Negotiation enables two parties to address misunderstandings and avoid conflicts through an exchange that depends as much on the interpersonal skills of the negotiators as the tactics employed. Acquiring these skills requires not only sound conceptual knowledge but also practice and mentoring. This...

In an environment of increasing importance of South–South bilateral trade partnerships, we assess the potential for improving bilateral trade between India and five Central Asian countries in this paper, and construct a trade potential index. We find huge untapped potential for increasing trade, and that India and Central Asia would benefit from policies that encourage trade, including bilatera...

A two-country model of oligopoly in general equilibrium is used to show how changes in market structure accompany the process of trade and capital market liberalisation. The model predicts that bilateral mergers in which low-cost firms buy out higher-cost foreign rivals are profitable under Cournot competition. With symmetric countries, welfare may rise or fall, though the distribution of incom...

We examine the case of an important outsider to the Cobden‐Chevalier network of bilateral treaties in the second half of the nineteenth century. We attempt to explain this through a study of the structure of Danish trade and protection. We demonstrate, in contrast to previous accounts that have considered Danish trade policy somewhat irrational, that Denmark was right to remai...

The paper investigates the effect of foreign aid on governance. Foreign aid’s effect on the quality of governance remains a widely debated topic. Theory provides conflicting guidance on this and the empirical record of previous research is not conclusive and often contradictory. Our research on a sample of South Asian and East Asian countries suggests that aid can have a positive effect on gove...

By means of a blend of theoretical arguments and computer algebra techniques, we prove that the number of isomorphism classes of hypergroups of type U on the right of order five, having a scalar (bilateral) identity, is 14 751. In this way, we complete the classification of hypergroups of type U on the right of order five, started in our preceding papers [M. De Salvo, D. Freni, G. Lo Faro, A ne...

We study reducing subspaces for an analytic multiplication operator Mzn on the Bergman space L 2 a(Ar) of the annulus Ar, and we prove that Mzn has exactly 2 reducing subspaces. Furthermore, in contrast to what happens for the disk, the same is true for the Hardy space on the annulus. Finally, we extend the results to certain bilateral weighted shifts, and interpret the results in the context o...

Research suggests that a donor country’s decision to provide post-disaster assistance is not only driven by the severity of a disaster and the resulting humanitarian needs in the recipient country but also by strategic considerations. We argue that the identification of the determinants of the size of disaster assistance is a first step in the analysis of the donor’s behavior. Since all aid is ...