We examine the degree of trust and reciprocity in an experimental trust game with 662 participants from six different age groups, ranging from 8 year old primary school children to retired persons in their late sixties. Although both trust and reciprocity have been identified as fundamental...

Even though decision-making in small teams is pervasive in business and in private life, little is known about subjects' preferences with respect to individual and team decision-making and about the consequences of respecting these preferences. We report the results from an experimental...

We study the influence of gender on economic decision making in a two-person bargaining game. By testing hypotheses derived from evolutionary psychology and social role theory, we find that (1) gender per se has no significant effect on behavior, whereas (2) gender pairing systematically affects...

Many decisions in economics and finance have to be made under severe time pressure. Furthermore, payoffs frequently depend on the speed of decision-making, like, for instance, when buying and selling stocks. In this paper, we examine the influence of time pressure and time-dependent incentive...

Economics has devoted little attention so far as to whether the type of decision maker matters for economic decisions. However, many important decisions like those on monetary policy or a company's business strategy are made by (small) groups rather than an individual. We compare behaviour of...

Direct democracy with its use of referenda avoids the prototypical principal-agent problems of delegation in indirect democracies, especially since elected representatives are usually not committed by law to keep their promises. Sequential or more complex referenda may, however, result in an...

Bidding challenges learning theories since experiences for the same bid vary stochastically: the same choice can result in a gain or a loss. In such an environment the question arises how the nearly universally documented phenomenon of loss aversion affects the adaptive dynamics. We analyze the...