We use a two-person public goods experiment to distinguish betweene±ciency and fairness as possible motivations for cooperative behavior.Asymmetric marginal per capita returns allow only the high-productivityplayer to increase group payo®s when contributing positive amounts....

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...

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...

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...

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...

´This paper aims to analize the role of personal identity indecision making. To this end, it starts by reviewing criticallythe growing literature on economics and identity. Consideringthe ambiguities that the concept of social identity poses, our proposalfocuses on the concept of personal...

Each of several exchange partners is the monopoly owner of a specific commoditywhich she can share with others. It is optimal to keep the own endowment, but allwould gain by mutual gift exchange. Participants play the game repeatedly in constantgroups (partner design) and can establish stable...

We adopt an evolutionary approach to investigate whether and when condi-tional cooperation can explain the voluntary contribution phenomenon oftenobserved in public goods experiments and in real life. Formally, conditionalcooperation is captured by a regret parameter describing how much an...