We report on an experiment using video technology to manipulate pre-play communication protocols in the lab and to study purely social effects of communication on donations and discrimination between potential receivers. The experimental design eliminates strategic factors by allowing two...

A common feature of the literature on the evolution of preferences is that evolution favors nonmaterialistic preferences only if preference types are observable at least to some degree. We argue that this result is due to the assumption that in each state of the evolutionary dynamics some...

The existing literature acknowledges that a mismatch between the experimenter's and the subjects' models of an experimental task can adversely affect the interpretation of data from laboratory experiments. We discuss why the two common experimental designs (between-subjects and within-subjects)...

We augment a standard dictator game to investigate how preferences for an environmental project relate to willingness to limit others' choices. We explore this issue by distinguishing three student groups: economists, environmental economists, and environmental social scientists. We find that...

Is the activity of volunteering something that benefits the volunteer as well as the recipient of the volunteer's activities? We analyze this relationship and apply matching estimators to the large-scale British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) data set to estimate the causal impact of volunteering...

A long time ago most economists would have limited themselves to stating that agreements should be individually rational and efficient and that selecting a specific agreement from that set depends on bargaining and negotiation power whatever that may be. Nowadays hardly any economist will argue...

Traditionally, giving in dictator games was assumed to signal preferences over others' payoffs. To date, several studies find that dictator game giving breaks down under conditions designed to increase dictators' anonymity or if an option to take money obscures the purpose of the task. Giving is...

This manual describes a z-Tree (Fischbacher, 2007) implementation of the paper-based Social Vaule Orientation (SVO) Slider Measure by Murphy et al. (2011). Using the paper-based version instead of the slider-based version (as implemented on the SVO-Website) avoids server-traffic related delays...

In many different contexts individuals take decisions on the behalf of others. However, little is known about how this circumstance affects the decision making process and influences the ultimate individuals´ choices. In this paper, we focus on the context of investment decisions and study if...

We provide a framework to decompose preferences into a notion of distributive justice and a selfishness part and to recover individual notions of distributive justice from data collected in appropriately designed experiments. "Dictator games" with varying transfer rates used in Andreoni and...