This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

In this paper, we introduce a generalized version of impulse balance equilibrium. The stationary concept is applied to 3 × 3 games based on the Bailiff and Poacher Game (Selten, 1991) and its predictive success is experimentally tested against the one of Nash equilibrium. Experiments with 26...

This paper reports an experimental investigation of a trust game using either cash or class credit as incentives to participants. We recruit from two auditorium classes. In one class, each token has cash value; in the other, each token is worth extra-credit points added to the students’ overall...

This survey explores the contributions of behavioral economics, laboratory experiments, and field experiments to our understanding of the economics of trust, trustworthiness, and reciprocal behavior. A general summary presenting the evolution of trust and reciprocity, departing from pure...

We conduct a laboratory experiment with a constant-sum sender–receiver game and a sequential game of matching pennies with the same payoff structure to investigate the impact of individuals’ first- and second-order beliefs on truth-telling. While first-movers in matching pennies choose an...

We test an implication that is common to all prominent theories of outcome-based other-regarding preferences: the ordinal preference ranking of an agent over a finite number of alternatives lying on any straight line in the space of material payoffs to oneself and some other agent must be...

Online labor markets have great potential as platforms for conducting experiments, as they provide immediate access to a large and diverse subject pool and allow researchers to conduct randomized controlled trials. We argue that online experiments can be just as valid - both internally and...

Data from 692 subjects in 11 experimental treatments provide a systematic exploration of the existence and nature of reciprocal behavior in two-person games. The experimental design discriminates between motivations of reciprocity and (nonreciprocal) other-regarding preferences. The existence of...

Previous research on gender differences in behavior has led to seemingly contradictory findings about generosity. From data generated by 290 subject pairs, we find that women are more sensitive than men to the costs of generous actions when deciding whether to be generous. The factors that...

We study the impact of social learning on the depth of reasoning in an experimental beauty-contest game. Naive advice and observation of others' decisions as two forms of social learning trigger faster convergence to the equilibrium. We find that subjects who receive advice outperform uninformed...