We investigate to what extent genuine social preferences can explain observed other-regarding behavior. In a dictator game variant subjects can choose whether to learn about the consequences of their choice for the receiver. We find that a majority of subjects showing other-regarding behavior...

The literature on social norms has often stressed that social disapproval is crucial to foster compliance with norms and promote fair and cooperative behavior. With this in mind, we explore the disapproval of allocation decisions using experimental data from five dictator games with a feedback...

In this paper, we claim that agents confronting with new interactive situations apply behavioral heuristics that drastically reduce the problem complexity either by neglecting the other players’ incentives, or by restricting attention to subsets of “salient” outcomes. We postulate that...

We study the evolution of strategic psychological capabilities in a population of interacting agents. Specifically,we consider agentswhich are either blind orwithmindsight, and either transparent or opaque. An agent with mindsight can observe the psychological makeup of a transparent agent,...

Game theory has focused attention on different problems at different times in its history. Currently, attention is devoted to investigating how human decision makers with bounded rationality choose strategies in interactive decisions. Behavioral economics, and more generally experimental games,...

We present a model of boundedly rational play in single-shot 2 × 2 games. Players choose strategies based on the perceived salience of their own payoffs and, if own-payoff salience is uninformative, on the perceived salience of their opponent's payoffs. When own payoffs are salient, the model's...

We investigate gender differences in lying behavior when the opportunity to tell lies is repeated. In specific, we distinguish the situations in which such an opportunity can be planned versus when it comes as a surprise. We utilize data from an existing published research and show that when the...

We investigate why a firm might purposefully hire a chief executive officer (CEO) who under- or over-estimates the degree of substitutability between competing products. This counterintuitive result arises in imperfect competition because CEO bias can affect rival behavior and the intensity of...

Human cooperation, occurring without reciprocation and between unrelated individuals in large populations, represents an evolutionary puzzle. One potential explanation is that cooperative behaviour may be transmitted between individuals via social learning. Using an online social dilemma...

We propose a dual selves model to integrate affective responses and belief-dependent emotions into game theory. We apply our model to team production and model a worker as being composed of a rational self, who chooses effort, and an emotional self, who expresses esteem. Similar to psychological...