A common feature of the literature on the evolution of preferencesis that evolution favors nonmaterialistic preferences only if preferencetypes are observable at least to some degree. We argue that this resultis due to the assumption that in each state of the evolutionary dynam-ics some Bayesian...

Actual behaviour is inuenced in important ways by moral emotions,for instance guilt or shame (see among others Tangney et al., 2007). Belief-dependant models of social preferences using the framework of psycho-logical games aim to consider such emotions to explain other-regardingbehaviour. Our...

We investigate the role of affect and deliberation on social preferences. In ourlaboratory experiment subjects decide on a series of mini Dictator games while they are undervarying degrees of cognitive load. The cognitive load is intended to decrease deliberation andtherefore enhance the...

Das Phänomen der Macht ist seit jeher ein Faszinosum. Es scheint im menschlichen Dasein allgegenwärtig zu sein, und es überrascht deshalb nicht, dass die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Thema wohl so alt wie die Menschheit selbst ist. Allerdings erweist sich das Machtphänomen aus theoretischer...

This lecture is a brief overview of an evolutionary theory of fairness. The ideasare fleshed out in a book Natural Justice, which is itself a condensed versionof an earlier two-volume book Game Theory and the Social Contract (Binmore[14, 12, 13])...

The notion of choice inconsistency is widely spread in the literature on behavioraleconomics. Several approaches were used to account for the observation that peoplereverse their choices over time. This paper aims to explain the formation of resolutionsregarded as internal self-binding devices....

The measurement of social norms plays a pivotal role in many social sciences.While economists predominantly conduct experiments, sociologistsrather employ (factorial) surveys. Both methods, however, suer from distinctweaknesses. Experiments, on the one hand, often fall short in themeasurement of...

Costly signaling of commitment to a group has been proposed as an explanation forparticipation in religion and ritual. But if the signal’s cost is too small, freeriders willsend the signal and behave selfishly later. Effective signaling may then be prohibitivelycostly. If the average level of...

This paper provides a new way to identify conditional cooperationin a real-time version of the standard voluntary contribution mechanism. Ourapproach avoids most drawbacks of the traditional procedures because it relieson endogenous cycle lengths, which are defined by the number of contributors...