An experimental test of the welfarism axiom

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1167362 (Table of Contents)

This thesis examines the empirical testability of an implicit axiom of the Cooperative Bargaining Theory,Welfarism Axiom. The previous articles that are testing the Nash Axioms are reviewed with particular attention to the test of scale invariance axiom. Since scale invariance is not a testable axiom, what unknowingly attempted in the previous works is the test of Welfarism Axiom. In this paper, we design an experiment to test this axiom explicitly. Our experimental results are consistent with what the most known cooperative bargaining rules, Nash, Kalai-Smorodinsky, and Egalitarian, predict. Moreover, the results are consistent with what the Wefarism Axiom predicts.