The strategy method is often used in public goods games to measure an individual's willingness to cooperate depending on the level of cooperation by their groupmates (conditional cooperation). However, while the strategy method is informative, it risks conflating confusion with a desire for fair...

This literature review focuses on cultural-related studies and game theory. First of all, it analyzes how social dynamics and strategic interactions can be shaped by different cultural environments. Secondly, it examines how cultural norms can affect strategic decision making and how game theory...

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...

Standard equilibrium concepts in game theory find it difficult to explain the empirical evidence from a large number of static games, including the prisoner's dilemma game, the hawk-dove game, voting games, public goods games and oligopoly games. Under uncertainty about what others will do in...

Ethics is a field in which the gap between words and actions looms large. Game theory and the empirical methods it inspires look at behavior instead of the lip service people sometimes pay to norms. We believe that this special issue comprises several illustrations of the fruitful application of...

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...

The paper presents a complete information model of bidding in second price sealed-bid and ascending-bid (English) auctions, in which potential buyers know the unit valuation of other bidders and may spitefully prefer that their rivals earn a lower surplus. Bidders with spiteful preferences...

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...

The relationship between risk in the environment, risk aversion and inequality aversion is not well understood. Theories of fairness have typically assumed that pie sizes are known ex-ante. Pie sizes are, however, rarely known ex ante. Using two simple allocation problems—the Dictator and...