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Arbitration is often used to settle bargaining disputes. Frequently in such disagreements, one party has better information with respect to the surplus to be allocated. This paper considers the impact that the choice of dispute resolution mechanism, conventional or final offer arbitration, has on settlement. This paper shows that theoretically final offer arbitration can systematically favor the informed party by shifting the contract zone towards more profitable allocations while conventional arbitration is theoretically less likely to generate a mutually agreeable settlement. Laboratory results find that the surplus shares are consistent with the predicted favoritism. However, settlement is positively correlated with the width of the contract zone and the data suggest that the location of the contract zone in final offer arbitration generates more disputes.

We replicate and extend the social history treatment of the Berg, Dickhaut, and McCabe (1995) investment game, to further document how the reporting of financial history influences how laboratory societies organize themselves over time. We replicate Berg et al. (1995) by conducting a No History and a Financial History session to determine whether a report summarizing the financial transactions of a previous experimental session will significantly reduce entropy in the amounts sent by Investors and returned by Stewards in the investment game, as Berg et al. (1995) found. We extend Berg et al. (1995) in two ways. First, we conduct a total of five sessions (one No History and four Financial History sessions). Second, we introduce Shannon’s (1948) measure of entropy from information theory to assess whether the introduction of financial transaction history reduces the amount of dispersion in the amounts invested and returned across generations of players. Results across sessions indicate that entropy declined in both the amounts sent by Investors and the percentage returned by Stewards, but these patterns are weaker and mixed compared to those in the Berg et al. (1995) study. Additional research is needed to test how initial conditions, path dependencies, actors’ strategic reasoning about others’ behavior, multiple sessions, and communication may mediate the impact of financial history. The study’s multiple successive Financial History sessions and entropy measure are new to the investment game literature.

Understanding how worker well-being is distributed across the population is of paramount importance. With such knowledge policy makers can devise efficient strategies to improve social welfare. This volume contains 13 chapters on topics enhancing our comprehension of inequality across workers. The issues addressed deal directly with the economic institutions that affect individual and family earnings distributions. The themes explored include job training, worker and firm mobility, minimum wages, wage arrears, unions, collective bargaining, unemployment insurance, and schooling. Among the questions answered are: To what extent do greater work hours of women mitigate the widening family earnings distribution? To what extent does deunionization widen the distribution of earnings? Do computers really cause a widening of the earnings distribution? How would the Russian wage distribution change if one accounted for wage arrears? How much of job creation and job destruction comes about because of business relocation? To what extent does maternal education increase children's education? Why do increases in the minimum wage fail to substantially decrease employment as economic theory would predict? And, to what extent do job skills matter for low-income workers?

In this paper, the authors present the insights and takeaways related to their experience with the design and development of ProblemUp!, a card game focused on helping higher education students develop personal strategies to overcome challenges in college and in life.

This paper presents a case study with analysis of and reflections on the design and development of an educational card game.

The design and development of ProblemUp! has engendered a number of insights to analyze, design and implement games that can help students become successful learners in school and life, beyond subject matter. The authors realized that it is worthwhile to offer different opportunities for players to engage with the game (e.g. alternative sets of rules, face-to-face and online versions), while at the same time keeping the game affordable, accessible and fun to play. Ultimately, ProblemUp! reflects a social and playful approach to learning that can help students become strategic learners and creative problem solvers in a complex and ever-changing world.

The potential contribution of ProblemUp! to students’ academic success in higher education is significant. Often students’ reluctance to face challenges is perceived as a lack of ability when it is actually a lack of knowledge and skills in metacognition and decision-making. If students have a sense of their own competence and control over challenges in academic learning, then they will be motivated to persevere with academic study. ProblemUp! offers the opportunity for students to develop knowledge and skills that are often hidden from them, their teachers and tutors.

In higher education, ProblemUp! has the potential for use in a variety of ways. It can be presented in post-secondary settings as a resource for students, with or without facilitation of tutors and others working to improve student retention. It can also be introduced within courses by a facilitator who can help students understand how the strategies they create can be adapted to overcome challenges within a course or, in general, for succeeding in college. Opportunities can also be created so that students can join an online game as the need arises, with or without support.

By speaking the “language of metacognition” embedded in the Cognitive Enrichment Advantage (CEA) approach (e.g. making comparisons, getting the main idea, connecting events, etc.), students can develop a “problem-solving grammar” which can be applied in a variety of situations to articulate the discourse on problems and the strategies to overcome them.

The paper presents a novel approach to metacognitive learning, strategic thinking and problem-solving by leveraging bizarre problems in a social-constructive environment. It also includes practical and usable insights for educators, teachers and game designers.

Are the sources and effects of executive stress echoed down the line on to the shopfloor of manufacturing industry? Should the researchers into the “stress‐chains” at managerial level turn their attention to the investigation of stress and stress‐reduction among blue‐collar workers? How far it can be done, and how parallel are the problems on each level, are questions which British industry might well concentrate upon to a greater extent than is evident from a review of the literature on stress over the last 5–10 years. This article describes recent work by the authors into the nature and effects of chains of stressors on the shopfloor which could be argued to be holding back real growth in the UK's manufacturing potential, chiefly through the diversion of energy for human growth into over‐concentration on factors leading to dissatisfaction at work.