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...

During the last three decades the ascent of behavioral economics clearly helped tobring down artificial disciplinary boundaries between psychology and economics.Noting that behavioral economics seems still under the spell of the rational choicetradition – and, indirectly, of behaviorism – we...

A common feature of the literature on the evolution of preferencesis that evolution favors nonmaterialistic preferences only if preferencetypes are observable at least to some degree. We argue that this resultis due to the assumption that in each state of the evolutionary dynam-ics some Bayesian...

We study the nature of dominance violations in three minimalist dominance-solvable guessing games, featuring two or three players choosing among two or three strategies. We examine how subjects’ reported reasoning translates into their choices and beliefs about others’ choices, and how...

In a public goods experiment, subjects can vary over a period of stochasticlength two contribution levels: one is publicly observable (their cheap talkstated intention), while the other is not seen by the others (their secretintention). When the period suddenly stops, participants are restricted...

In a recently published article, Bruni and Stanca (2008) suggest that television viewing has a negative impact on life satisfaction. In this note we argue that the empirical approach they use (an approach that omits the main effect of TV viewing in life satisfaction) is problematic.We estimate a...

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...

We analyze the effect of investments in corporate social responsibility(CSR) on workers’ motivation. In our experiment, a gift exchange game variant,CSR is captured by donating a certain share of profits to a charity. Weare testing for CSR effects by varying the possible share of profits given...

Agents compete to acquire a limited economic opportunity of uncertain pro…tability.Each agent decides how much he acquires public signals before making investmentunder fear of preemption. I show that equilibria have various levels of e¢ ciency undermild competition. The e¤ect of competition...

Unlike previous attempts to implement cooperation in a prisoners’ dilemma gamewith an infinite horizon in the laboratory, we focus on extended prisoners’ dilemmagames in which a second (pure strategy) equilibrium allows for voluntary cooperationin all but the last round. Our four main...