Both the law and culture make a central distinction between acts of commission that overturn the status quo and acts of omission that uphold it. In everyday life acts of commission often elicit stronger reciprocal responses than do acts of omission. In this paper we compare reciprocal responses...

Previous research has suggested that communication and especially promises in-crease cooperation in laboratory experiments. This has been taken as evidence for internal motivations such as guilt aversion or preference for promise keeping. The goals of this paper are to examine messages under a...

This paper tests Psychological Forward Induction in the Lost Wallet Game, in an attempt to explain an empirical puzzle observed by Dufwenberg & Gneezy (2000) that the size of the outside option forgone by the first mover does not affect the behavior of the second mover. This is puzzling as...

Durch die Aufweichung des Kyoto-Protokolls gelang es während des Bonner Klimagipfels die aus Sicht ihrer jeweiligen Interessenlage heterogenen Länder Japan, Australien, Kanada und Rußland trotz Absage der USA in den internationalen Klimaschutz einzubinden. Mit Hilfe des Optionswertes des...

This paper reports on an experiment studying the effectiveness of two types of mechanisms for promoting trust: pecuniary and non-pecuniary as well as their mutual interaction. Our data provide evidence that both mechanisms significantly enhance trust in comparison to the standard investment...

This paper explores how information about paired subject's previous action affects one's own behavior in a dictator game. The first experiment puts dictators in two environments where they can either give money to the paired player or take money away from them: one where the recipient is a...

We introduce the class of multi-sided B ohm-Bawerk assignment games, which generalizes the well-kown two-sided B ohm-Bawerk assignment games to situations with an arbitrary number of sectors. We reach the extreme core allocations of any multi-sided B ohm- Bawerk assignment game by means of an...

I prove that, in assignment markets with more than two sides, agents of different sides (or sectors) need not be complements, whereas agents of the same side need not be substitutes. Shapley (1962) showed that this cannot happen when assignment markets are bilateral. Nevertheless, I found...

This paper reports an experiment evaluating the effect of gift giving on building trust in a relationship. We have nested our explorations in the standard version of the investment game. Our gift treatment includes a dictator stage in which the trustee decides whether to give a gift to the...

This paper experimentally investigates whether risk-averse individuals punish less if the outcome of punishment is uncertain than when it is certain. Our design includes three treatments: Baseline in which the one-shot prisoner’s dilemma game is played; Certain Punishment in which the...