Solomon's Dilemma: An experimental study on dynamic implementation

This paper reports an experimental investigation on two mechanisms for the so-called King Solomon Dilemma, where one of them fails to implement the social choice rule dynamically. We compare the two mechanisms in terms of their welfare, incentive and learning properties.Received: 9 October 2000, Accepted: 13 February 2003, JEL Classification: C70, C78The authors are grateful to José Agulló, Paolo Battigalli, Ted Bergstrom, Ken Binmore, Sandro Brusco, Antonio Cabrales, Francesco Feri, Leo Hurwicz, Raffaele Miniaci, Miguel Angel Meléndez, Juan Mora, Juan D. Moreno-Ternero and seminar participants at the universities of Alicante and Trento for stimulating comments. We also thank an anonymous referee for thoughtful comments and, in particular, for raising questions that led to run additional sessions that significantly improved Sect. 4.4. Usual disclaimers apply. The first version of this paper was written while Giovanni Ponti was visiting the Department of Economics at UCSB. He thanks the Department for providing hospitality, encouragement and funding to run some experimental sessions. Financial support was also provided by CICYT (BEC2001-0980) and by the Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas (IVIE).