We examine the degree of trust and trustworthiness in an experimental trust game with 662 participants from six different age groups, ranging from 8-year-olds to retired persons. Although both trust and trustworthiness have been identified as fundamental pillars for efficient economic...

We report evidence from public goods experiments with and without punishment which we conducted in Russia with 566 urban and rural participants of young and mature age cohorts. Russia is interesting for studying voluntary cooperation because of its long history of collectivism, and a huge...

Time-consuming and costly religious rituals pose a puzzle for economists committed to rational choice theories of human behavior. We propose that religious rituals promote in-group trust and cooperation that help to overcome collective-action problems. To test this hypothesis we design field...

Economic analyses of asymmetric information typically start with the assumption that individuals know more about their own characteristics than outside observers. This assumption implies that individuals can accurately assess their own competence in a given domain. However, individuals can only...

In November 2001, 5,558 readers of the German weekly Die Zeit participated in a three-person ultimatum experiment involving a proposer X, a responder Y, and a dummy Z (Guth and van Damme, 1998). A proposal is a vector (x,y,z) with x + y + z = DM 1,200, and x in {0, 200, 400, 600, 800, 1000}, and...

The minimax argument represents game theory in its most elegant form: simple but with stark predictions. Although some of these predictions have been met with reasonable success in the field, experimental data have generally not provided results close to the theoretical predictions. In a...