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...

Why is it that well-intentioned actions can create persistent conflicts? While norms are widely regarded as a source for cooperation,this article proposes a novel theory in which the emergence of normscan be understood as a bargaining process in which normative conflicts explain the nally...

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...

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...

I conduct an experiment to assess whether majority voting on a nonbindingsharing norm affects subsequent behavior in a dictator game. Ina baseline treatment, subjects play a one shot dictator game. In a votingtreatment, subjects are first placed behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ and vote onthe...

We analyze the effects of introducing asymmetric information andexpectations in the investment game (Berg et al., 1995). In our experiment,only the trustee knows the size of the surplus. Subjects’expectations about each other’s behavior are also elicited. Our resultsshow that average payback...

Economic decisions have been shown to depend on actual outcomes as well as perceived intentions. In this paper, we examine wether and how the relative importance of outcomes or intentions for economic decision develops with age. We report the resullt of ultimatum games with children, teens and...

This paper investigates distributive justice using a fourfold experimental design:The ignorance and the risk scenarios are combined with the self-concernand the umpire modes. We study behavioral switches between self-concernand umpire mode and investigate the goodness of ten standards of...

Fairness is a strong concern as shown by dictator and ultimatum experiments. Efficiency, measured by the sum of individual payoffs, is a potentially competing concern in games such as the prisoners' dilemma. In our experiment participants can increase efficiency by gift giving. In the one-sided...

One-shot interaction and repeated interaction often co-exist in the real world. We study possible behavioral effects of this co-existence in a principal-agent setting, in which a principal simultaneously employs a permanent and a temporary agent. Our experimental results indicate that there is...