During the last three decades the ascent of behavioral economics clearly helped to bring down artificial disciplinary boundaries between psychology and economics. Noting that behavioral economics seems still under the spell of the rational choice tradition and, indirectly, of behaviorism we...

Concessions try to avoid conflict in bargaining and can finally lead to an agreement. Although they usually are seen as unfolding in time, concessions can also be studied in normal form or by conditioning only on failure of earlier agreement attempts. We experimentally compare three protocols of...

In line with the widely applied principle of just deserts, we assume that the severity of the penalty on a contract offender increases in the harm on the other. When this principle holds, the influence of the efficiency of the agreement on the incentives to abide by it crucially depends on...

Most research in economics models agents somehow motivated by outcomes. Here, we model agents motivated by procedures instead, where procedures are defined independently of an outcome. To that end, we design procedures which yield the same expected outcomes or carry the same information on...

The satisficing approach is generalized and applied to finite n-person games. Based on direct elicitation of aspirations, we formally define the concept of satisficing, which does not exclude (prior-free) optimality but includes it as a border case. We also review some experiments on strategic...

One may hope to capture the behavioral and emotional effects of downsizing the laborforce in rather abstract settings as an ultimatum game (see Fischer et al. (2008)), or try to explore downsizing in its more natural principalagent scenario with a labor market background. We pursue the latter...

If the future market wage is uncertain, engaging in long–term employment is risky, with the risk depending on how regulated the labor market is. In our experiment long–term employment can result either from offering long–term contracts or from repeatedly and mutually opting for...

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

This article examines the nature of human behavior in a nested social dilemma referred to as the Spillover Game. Players are divided into two groups with positive production interdependencies. Based on theoretically derived opportunistic, local, and global optima, our experimental results...

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...