Economics has devoted little attention so far as to whether the type of decision maker matters for economic decisions. However, many important decisions like those on monetary policy or a company’s business strategy are made by (small) groups rather than an individual. We compare behaviour of...

We analyze the effects of introducing asymmetric information andexpectations in the investment game (Berg et al., 1995). In our experiment,only the trustee knows the size of the surplus. Subjects’expectations about each other’s behavior are also elicited. Our resultsshow that average payback...

We investigate experimentally whether entry costs have an impact on the evolutionof cooperation in a social dilemma game. In particular, subjects repeatedly playthe so-called takeover game with anonymous partners randomly drawn from a fixedpopulation of participants. The game represents a social...

Even though decision-making in small teams is pervasive in business and in private life, littleis known about subjects’ preferences with respect to individual and team decision-making andabout the consequences of respecting these preferences. We report the results from anexperimental...

We introduce a generalized theoretical approach to study imitation andsubject it to rigorous experimental testing. In our theoretical analysiswe …nd that the different predictions of previous imitation models aredue to different informational assumptions, not to different behavioralrules. It is...

We test for behavioral differences between groups and individuals in gift-exchange experiments. Related studies establish group behavior as typically closer to the game-theoretic equilibrium. We show that this result my depend crucially on the decision making procedure within groups. A novel...

Economic decisions have been shown to depend on actual outcomes as well as perceived intentions. In this paper, we examine wether and how the relative importance of outcomes or intentions for economic decision develops with age. We report the resullt of ultimatum games with children, teens and...

Value Surveys may reveal well-behaved societies by the statistical treatment of the agents` declarations of compliance with social values. Similarly, the results of experiments conducted on games with conflict of interest trace back to two important primitives of social capital trust and...

Following the notion that organizations often face public good dilemmas when collective action is needed, we use a real-time provision-point mechanism to experimentally explore the process of achieving cooperative equilibria. Specifically, besides exploring group outcomes, we identify individual...

In the Solidarity Game (Selten and Ockenfels, 1998), two "rich" persons can support a "poor" one. A strong positive correlation between one rich person's solidarity contribution and his expected contribution of the other is observed. This paper investigates the causality behind this correlation....