The evolution of trustworthiness as a major aspect of business ethics depends crucially on whether it can be signaled. If this is impossible, only opportunistic traders will survive. Whereas previous studies have analysed detection agencies (Güth and Kliemt, 1994 and 1998) or have substituted...

The Trust Game describes a situation where mutually beneficial trade is endangered by opportunistic exploitation. In the Trust Game with Banks this dilemma can be avoided by banks guaranteeing that sellers will be paid. This outcome is, however, not the only possible solution. Bank interference...

Direct reciprocity means to respond in kind to another person whereas indirect reciprocity is understood here as rewarding someone else. We perform corresponding experiments which use a similar underlying structure as the reciprocity experiment of Berg, Dickhaut, and McCabe (1995). Another...

Choice between different versions of a game may provide a means of sorting, allowing players with different preferences to self-select into groups of similar types. We experimentally investigate whether auctioning off the right to play a prisoner’s dilemma game in which the cost of unilateral...

Studying evolutionarily successful behavior we show in a general framework that when individuals maximizing payoff differentials invest resources in punishing others. Interestingly, these investments are increasing in individuals, own wealth and decreasing in the wealth of others.

The findings on the ultimatum game are considered as belonging to the most robust experimental results. In this paper we present a slightly altered version of the mini ultimatum game of Bolton and Zwick (1995). Whereas in the latter exactly equal splits were feasible in our games these were...

The study of evolutionary dynamics was so far mainly restricted to finite strategy spaces. In this paper we show that this restriction is in most cases unnecessary. We give a mild condition under which the continuous time replicator dynamics are well defined for infinite strategy spaces....

Whoever exists belongs to a species, which did not become extinct, has a (geno-) type, which should be well adjusted, and lives in a habitat which has been sustainable for a long time. To capture the first aspect we allow for interspecies competition and analyze the conditions for species...

We analyze the dynamics of a game of sequential bidding in the presence of stochastic scale effects in the form of stochastic economies or diseconomies of scale. We show that economies give rise to declining expected equilibrium prices, whereas the converse is not generally true. Moreover,...

The theory of industrial organization has experienced an impressive boom by using the methods of (non-cooperative) game theory. The conclusions depend, however. crucially on subtle details of the market decision processes about which there exist no or little empirical information. Studies of...