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...

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...

This paper examines the concepts of trust and trustworthiness in the context of a one-sided variation of the prisoner's dilemma, and it evaluates four different categories of solutions to the PD problem: changing player preferences, enforcing explicit contracts, establishing implicit contracts,...

Using a South African data set, the paper poses six questions about the determinants of subjective well-being. Much of the paper is concerned with the role of relative concepts. We find that comparator income – measured as average income of others in the local residential cluster - enters the...

Suppose an altruistic person, A, is willing to transfer resources to a second person, B, if B comes upon hard times. If B anticipates that A will act in this manner, B will save too little from both agents' point of view. This is the Samaritan's dilemma. The logic of the dilemma has been...

Donors who try to impose policy conditionality on countries receiving their aid commonly face conflicting incentives between using aid to induce income-increasing reforms and using aid to assist low-income countries: this conflict can lead to a time-consistency problem.This paper offers a...