Should one use words or money to foster trust of the other party if no means of enforcing trustworthiness are available? This paper reports an experiment studying the effectiveness of two types of mechanisms for promoting trust: a costly gift and a costless message as well as their mutual...

This paper proposes a novel explanation for the context dependency of individual choices in two-player games. Context dependency refers to the well-established phenomenon that a player, when choosing from a given opportunity set created by the other player’s strategy, chooses differently in...

We test the assumption that preferences are unchanged throughout a strategic game in the absence of feedback. To do so, we study the relationship between the strategic nature of a game and players' identification in social groups. We present evidence that the strategic nature of the game affects...

We analyze the effects of introducing asymmetric information and expectations in the investment game (Berg et al., 1995). In our experiment, only the trustee knows the size of the surplus. Subjects’ expectations about each other’s behavior are also elicited. Our results show that average...

We study how players learn to make decisions if they face many different games. Games are drawn randomly from a set of either two or six games in each of 100 rounds. If either there are few games or if extensive summary information is provided (or both) convergence to the unique Nash equilibrium...

We re-examine preference reversal data from previously published studies to (1) identify the effects of different incentive treatments and (2) determine the models that best explain data patterns across incentive treatments. Contrary to the quot;folk-wisdomquot; that incentives do not affect...