One of the long-standing puzzles in economics is why wages do not fall sufficiently in recessions so as to avoid increases in unemployment. Put differently, if the competitive market wage declines, why don't employers simply force their employees to accept lower wages as well? As an alternative...

In impunity games proposers, like allocators in dictator games, can take what they want; however, responders can refuse offers deemed unsatisfactory at own cost. We modify the impunity game via allowing offers to condition of another participant's counterfactual generosity intention. For a given...

We report experimental results on the minority of three-game, where three players choose one of two alternatives and the most rewarding alternative is the one chosen by a single player. This coordination game has many asymmetric equilibria in pure strategies that are non-strict and...

Institutions may rely on fundamental principles, e.g., of legal philosophy, but may also have evolved according to institutional fitness, as gauged by a society's well-being. In our stylized framework where two fundamental principles, equality and efficiency, conflict with each other, one of the...

Game and decision theory start from rather strong premises. Preferences, represented by utilities, beliefs represented by probabilities, common knowledge and symmetric rationality as background assumptions are treated as “given.” A richer language enabling us to capture the process leading...

In two-person generosity games, the proposer’s agreement payoff is exogenously given, whereas that of the responder is endogenously determined by the proposer’s choice of the pie size. In three-person generosity games, equal agreement payoffs for two of the players are either exogenously...

In repeated public good experiments, reciprocity helps to sustain high levels of cooperation. Can this be achieved by location choices in addition to making contributions? It is more realistic to rely on an intuitive neighborhood model for community members who interact repeatedly. In our...

Direct reciprocity means to respond in kind to another person whereas indirect reciprocity is understood here as rewarding someone else. We perform corresponding experiments which use a similar underlying structure as the reciprocity experiment of Berg, Dickhaut, and McCabe (1995). Another...

We study behavior in experimental beauty contests with, first, boundary and interior equilibria, and, second, homogeneous and heterogenous types of players. We find quicker and better convergence to the game-theoretic equilibrium with interior equilibria and homogeneous players.

In standard rational choice modelling decisions are made according to given information and preferences. In the model presented here the 'information technology' of individual decision makers as well as their preferences evolve in a dynamic process. In this process decisions are made rationally...