Social preferences and social influence effects ("peer effects") are well documented, but little is known about how peers shape social preferences. Settings where social preferences matter are often situations where peer effects are likely too. In a gift-exchange experiment with independent...

This chapter presents some insights from basic behavioural research on the role of human pro-social motivation to maintain social order. I argue that social order can be conceptualised as a public good game. Past attempts to explain social order typically relied on the assumption of selfish and...

This paper extends the Baron-Ferejohn model of legislative bargaining to general weighted majority games with two modifications: first, payoff division can only be agreed upon after the coalition has formed (two-stage bargaining); second, negotiations in the coalition can break down, in which...

The evolutionary stability of payoff-maximizing preferences in the model of indirect evolution in symmetric games depends on the slope of the reaction function being zero at equilibrium. The application of this result to contests confirms that in two-player contests the optimal delegation...

We introduce two variants of the one-shot joy-of-destruction minigame (mini-JOD). Two players are endowed with the same amount of money. They simultaneously decide whether or not to reduce the payoff of the other player at an own cost. In one treatment there was a probability that Nature would...

There is by now ample evidence from laboratory experiments that individuals exhibit "prosocial" or "other-regarding" preferences. However, a key question is whether the importance of other-regarding preferences documented in the laboratory can be readily generalized to draw conclusions about the...