This paper presents an overlapping generations model to explain why humans live in families rather than in other pair groupings. Since most non-human species are not familial, something special must be behind the family. It is shown that the two necessary features that explain the origin of the...

Explaining the evolution and maintenance of cooperation among unrelated individuals is one of the fundamental problems in biology and the social sciences. Recent experimental evidence suggests that altruistic punishment is an important mechanism to maintain cooperation among humans. In this...

Do large language models (LLMs) - such as ChatGPT 3.5, ChatGPT 4.0, and Google's Gemini 1.0 Pro - simulate human behavior in the context of the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) game with varying stake sizes? This paper investigates this question, examining how LLMs navigate scenarios where...

Despite recent advances, no general methods for computing bargaining power in non-cooperative games exist. We propose a number of axioms such a measure should satisfy and show that they characterise a unique function. The principle underlying this measure is that the influence of a player can be...

This paper examines the reflexive interplay between individual decisions and social forces to analyze the evolution of cooperation in the presence of "multi-directedness," whereby people's preferences depend on their psychological motives. People have access to multiple, discrete motives....

This paper reports the results of a laboratory experiment on network formation among heterogeneous agents. The experimental design extends the basic Bala-Goyal (2000) model of network formation with decay and two-way flow of benefits by allowing for agents with lower linking costs or higher...

We investigate how strongly the local environment beyond the family can contribute to understanding the formation of children's economic preferences. Building on precise geolocation data for around 6.000 children, we use fixed effects, spatial autoregressive models and Kriging to capture the...

Identifying sensitive periods in which the returns to investments into skills are especially high is challenging, but crucial for an effective and efficient timing of parental or public investments aimed at fostering children's skills. We can detect sensitive periods with a novel design by...

We study cheating as a collective-risk social dilemma in a group setting in which individuals are asked to report their actual outcomes. Misreporting their outcomes increases the individual's earnings but when the sum of claims in the group reaches a certain threshold, a risk of collective...

Social networks are a key factor of success in life, but they are also strongly segmented on gender, ethnicity, and other demographic characteristics (Jackson, 2010). We present novel evidence on an understudied source of homophily, namely behavioral traits. Behavioral traits are important...