The common prior assumption justifies private beliefs as posterior probabilities when updating a common prior based on individual information. Common priors are pervasive in most economic models of incomplete information and oligopoly models with asymmetrically informed firms. We dispose of the...

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...

In a large scale newspaper experiment 5,132 readers of the German weekly, Die Zeit, participated in a three-person bargaining game. In our data analysis we focus on (1) the influence of age, gender, profession and the medium chosen for participation on bargaining behavior and on (2) the external...

In one-shot investment game experiments where each player's payoff is a convex combination of own and other's profit, trust remains unaffected by the extent of interdependence whereas trustworthiness reacts positively to it.

Social institutions regulating group conduct have been regarded as necessary for human cooperation to transcend family bonds. However, many studies in economics and biology indicate that reciprocity based on repeated interaction su_ces to establish cooperation with non-kin. We shed light on the...

Experiments suggest that communication increases the contribution to public goods (Ledyard, 1995). There is also evidence that, when contemplating a lie, people trade off their private benefit from the lie with the harm it inflicts on others (Gneezy, 2005). We develop a model of bilateral...