Departures from pure self interest in economic experiments have recently inspired models of "social preferences". We conduct experiments on simple two-person and three-person games with binary choices that test these theories more directly than the array of games conventionally considered. Our...

Departures from self-interest in economic experiments have recently inspired models of "social preferences". We design a range of simple experimental games that test these theories more directly than existing experiments. Our experiments show that subjects are more concerned with increasing...

It is traditional in experimental games to allow participants to choose only actions or possibly communicate intended play. In sequential two-person games, we require first movers to express a preference between responder choices. We find that responder behavior differs substantially according...

This study describe an experiment on individual learning in the domain of cognitive economics. The authors’ main goal is to observe and to describe how subjects elaborate rules and regularities in problem solving. Involved subjects are asked to choose between different scores related to an...

Experiments with the ultimatum game -- where one party can make a take-it-or-leave-it offer to a second party on how to split a pie -- illustrate that conventional game theory has been wrong in its predictions regarding the simplest of bargaining settings: Even when one party has enormous...

People underappreciate how their own behavior and exogenous factors affect their future utility, and thus exaggerate the degree to which their future preferences resemble their current preferences. We present evidence which demonstrates the prevalence of such projection bias, and develop a...

We apply Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to the concept of utility and then go on to a new model where individual’s behavior is aimed at reaching optimal level of arousal of neural system and optimal level of domination in social ranking.

Economics as a 'trade' does very well in New Zealand. Economists are taken relatively seriously in government policy processes. For better or worse, economic ideas were major drivers of the reforms in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Plenty of well-paid job opportunities exist in the private...

Teaching economics has been shown to encourage students to defect in a prisoner's dilemma game. However, can ethics training reverse that effect and promote cooperation? We conducted an experiment to answer this question. We found that students who had the ethics module had higher rates of...

This note describes an experiment, which is an extension of the experiment proposed by Levy and Bergen (1993). The experiment is designed to simulate an environment where something that is very similar to fiat money (i.e., is homogenous, durable, portable, storable, divisible, has no intrinsic...