Informational asymmetries abound in economic decision making and often provide an incentive for deception through telling a lie or misrepresenting information. In this paper I use a cheap-talk sender-receiver experiment to show that telling the truth should be classified as deception too if the...

Credence goods markets are characterized by asymmetric information between sellers and consumers that may give rise to inefficiencies, such as under- and overtreatment or market break-down. We study in a large experiment with 936 participants the determinants for efficiency in credence goods...

While most papers on team decision-making find that teams behave more selfishly, less trustingly and less altruistically than individuals, Cason and Mui (1997) report that teams are more altruistic than individuals in a dictator game. Using a within-subjects design we re-examine group...

We examine gender differences in trust in another party?s cooperation (CC) or its ability (AC). While men and women do not differ concerning trust in cooperation, gender has a strong influence when trust in another subject?s ability is required.

We show in a public goods experiment on three continents that conditional cooperation is a universal behavioral regularity. Yet, the number of conditional cooperators and the extent of conditional cooperation are much higher in the U.S.A. than anywhere else.

We study the influence of gender and gender pairing on economic decision making in an experimental two-person bargaining game where the other party?s gender is known to both actors. We find that (1) gender per se has no significant effect on behavior, whereas (2) gender pairing systematically...

We study the impact of advice or observation on the depth of reasoning in an experimental beauty-contest game. Both sources of information trigger faster convergence to the equilibrium. Yet, we find that subjects who receive naive advice outperform uninformed subjects permanently, whereas...

In this paper it is shown that the combination of mental accounting and loss aversion can fundamentally changes people's way of evaluating risky alternatives. The observation is applied in a market setting: Parimutuel betting markets. In parimutuel betting markets it has been found that for...

In markets where transactions are governed by contractual incompleteness, revealed intentions to evade taxes may affect market performance. We experimentally examine the impact of tax evasion attempts on the performance of credence goods markets, where contractual incompleteness results from...

We analyze the strategic decision of firms to voluntarily certify corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices in a context where other firms can falsely pretend to be socially responsible. Equilibrium outcomes are crucially determined by consumers' beliefs about the credibility of firms' CSR...