We use a two-person linear voluntary contribution mechanism with stochastic marginal benefits from the public good to examine the effect of imperfect information on contributions levels. To assess prior risk attitudes, individual valuations of several risky prospects are elicited via a...

A novel two-person "charity game" is used to experimentally investigate whether anticipation of help crowds out incentives to work, and therefore impulses to help. We distinguish two treatments differing in whether the causes of neediness are verifiable or not. Helping behavior does not vary...

We examine the influence of team size on decision making in a beauty-contest experiment. Teams with four members outperform teams with two members and single persons significantly, whereas the latter two types of decision makers do not differ.

We report the results of an experimental study that compares voting mechanisms in the provision of public goods. Subjects can freely decide how much they want to contribute. Whether the public good is finally provided is decided by a referendum under full information about all contributions. If...

Even though decision-making in small teams is pervasive in business and in private life, little is known about subjects' preferences with respect to individual and team decision-making and about the consequences of respecting these preferences. We report the results from an experimental...

Conventions can be narrowly interpreted as coordinated ways of equilibrium play, i.e., a specific convention tells all players in a game with multiple strict equilibria which equilibrium to play. In our view, coordination often takes place before learning about the games. Thus, one has to...

We examine experimentally two different types of trust: trust in another party’s cooperation and trust in ability. In the cooperation condition, player A sends x ? {0, X} to player B. The amount x is multiplied by c = 3, and B can return y ? {0,3x}. In the ability condition, c depends on B’s...

On an otherwise symmetric oligopoly market with stochastic demands for heterogeneous products firms can either hire an employee or partner or buy the required labor input on the labor market. Whereas the wage of hired labor does not depend in the realization of stochastic demand, the price of...

We study the influence of gender on economic decision making in a two-person bargaining game. By testing hypotheses derived from evolutionary psychology and social role theory, we find that (1) gender per se has no significant effect on behavior, whereas (2) gender pairing systematically affects...

We study an ultimatum experiment in which the responder does not know the offer when accepting or rejecting. Unconditional veto power leads to acceptances, although proposers are significantly greedier than in standard ultimatum games, and this is anticipated by responders.