Does geographic or (perceived) social distance between subjects signi?cantly affect proposer and responder behavior in ultimatum bargaining? To answer this question, subjects once play an ultimatum game with three players (proposer, responder, and dummy player) and asymmetric information (only...

The literature on social preferences provides overwhelming evidence of departures from pure self-interest of individuals. Experiments show that people care about others' well-being and their relative standing. This paper investigates whether this type of behavior persists when risk comes into...

We analyze distributional preferences in games in which a decider chooses the provision of a good that benefits a receiver and creates costs for a group of payers. The average decider takes into account the welfare of all parties and has concerns for efficiency. However, she attaches similar...

In-group favoritism in social dilemma situations is one of the main findings of studies in Social Identity Theory. We investigate what causes the in-group bias: is it due to mere group affiliation or, alternatively, is guilt-aversion a possible explanation? We induce group membership in a...

We conduct a modified dictator game in order to analyze the role self-image concerns play in other-regarding behavior. While we generally follow Konow (2000), a cognitive dissonance-based model of other-regarding behavior in dictator games, we relax one of its assumptions as we allow for...

We study the role of self-interest and social preferences in referenda. Our analysis is based on collective purchasing decisions of university students on deep-discount flat rate tickets for public transportation and culture. Individual usage data allows quantifying monetary benefits associated...

We empirically investigate the effect of social preferences on portfolio choice. We use administrative investor data and link them to behavior in a controlled experiment and to survey responses. We show that social preferences rather than (biased) risk-return expectations are predictive for...

In many cultures and industries gifts are given in order to influence the recipient, often at the expense of a third party. Examples include business gifts of firms and lobbyists. In a series of experiments, we show that, even without incentive or informational effects, small gifts strongly...

Theory of mind and individual preferences are important determinants in social decision making. The current study examined in a large sample whether being a cooperative preference type is related with better theory of mind skills. Furthermore, by testing adolescents and adults, we examined the...

Although both economists and psychologists seek to identify determinants of heterogeneity in behavior, they use different concepts to capture them. In this review we first analyze the extent to which economic preferences and psychological concepts of personality - such as the Big Five and locus...