Unlike previous attempts to implement cooperation in a prisoners’ dilemma gamewith an infinite horizon in the laboratory, we focus on extended prisoners’ dilemmagames in which a second (pure strategy) equilibrium allows for voluntary cooperationin all but the last round. Our four main...

During the last three decades the ascent of behavioral economics clearly helped tobring down artificial disciplinary boundaries between psychology and economics.Noting that behavioral economics seems still under the spell of the rational choicetradition – and, indirectly, of behaviorism – we...

Bereits im Jahre 1980 wählte Horst Albach einen spieltheoretischen und experimentellökonomischenZugang zum Vertrauensproblem in der Ökonomik. Dieser Weg wird erneutbeschritten. Es wird aufgezeigt, dass neuere spieltheoretische und experimentelle Arbeitennicht nur die explanativen Grenzen des...

Economic intuitions concerning rational behaviour in interactive social situations are shaped byidealized models which are regarded as “approximately true”. But ideal models cannot be meaningfullydeemed approximately true unless asymptotically convergent processes imply them as limit cases....

Subjective payoffs that represent given preferences “all things considered” together withstrictly uncommitted opportunity taking cannot account for the behavior of personal actors. It is shown how agent basedapproaches can explicitly capture internal commitments of persons while sticking to...

Two traditional assumptions in neo-classical economics have beenmaterial self-interest and (commonly known) decision rationality. Sincethere is ample contradictory empirical evidence, many recent attemptshave been made to remodel the situation so that rational behavior ismore in line with actual...

Traditional game theory usually relies on commonly known decision rationality meaning that choices are made in view of their consequences (the shadow of the future). Evolutionary game theory, however, denies any cognitive deliberation by assuming that choice behavior evolves due to its past...

In this note we establish that rational demand expectations willtypically not evolve in an evolutionary model. In an evolutionarymodel beliefs act like a commitment device to more aggressive be-havior. This commitment effect has the same direction for strategicsubstitutes and complements and...

Taking seriously the philosophical foundations of classical strategic theories of choice-making we scrutinize to what extent planning on on equilibrium strategies can be justified "eductively" among rational players and how this can be utilized to analyze games by their "game-like"...

Are commonly known beliefs essential for bidding behavior in asymmetric auctions? Our experimental results suggest that not informing participants how values are randomly generated does not change behavior much and may even make it appear more rational.