The literature on social preferences provides overwhelming evidence of departuresfrom pure self-interest of individuals. Experiments show that people care about others’well-being and their relative standing. This paper investigates whether this type ofbehavior persists when risk comes into...

A unique indivisible commodity with an unknown common value is owned bygroup of individuals and should be allocated to one of them while compensating theothers monetarily. We study the so-called fair division game (Güth, Ivanova-Stenzel,Königstein, and Strobel (2002, 2005)) theoretically and...

Norms play an important role in establishing social order. Thecurrent literature focuses on the emergence, maintenance and impactof norms with regard to coordination and cooperation. However, theissue of norm-related conict deserves more attention. We develop ageneral theory of \normative...

We study ultimatum and dictator experiments where the first moverchooses the amount of money to be distributed between the playerswithin a given interval, knowing that her own share is fixed. Thus, thefirst mover is faced with scarcity, but not with the typical trade-off betweenher own and the...

Actual behaviour is inuenced in important ways by moral emotions,for instance guilt or shame (see among others Tangney et al., 2007). Belief-dependant models of social preferences using the framework of psycho-logical games aim to consider such emotions to explain other-regardingbehaviour. Our...

The measurement of social norms plays a pivotal role in many social sciences.While economists predominantly conduct experiments, sociologistsrather employ (factorial) surveys. Both methods, however, suer from distinctweaknesses. Experiments, on the one hand, often fall short in themeasurement of...

Economic theory has evolved without paying proper attention to behavioral approaches,especially to social, economic, and cognitive psychology. This has recently changed byincluding behavioral economics courses in many doctoral study programs. Although thisnew development is most welcome, the...

This paper studies the response times of experimental subjects playingthe Ultimatum game in a laboratory setting using monetary incentives.We find that proposals are not significantly correlated with responsetime, whereas responders’ behavior is positively and significantlycorrelated. Hence,...

Does geographic distance or the perceived social distance between subjects significantlyaffect proposer and responder behavior in ultimatum bargaining? To answer this question,subjects play a one-shot ultimatum game with three players (proposer, responder, and apassive dummy player) and...

Theory absorption, a notion introduced by Morgenstern and Schwödiauer (1972)and further elaborated by Güth and Kliemt (2004), discusses the problem whether atheory can survive its own acceptance. Whereas this holds for strategic equilibria accordingto the assumptions on which they are based,...