Contrary to communitarian market criticism institutions relying on money and bidding can strengthen faculties of ‘self-governance’. Securing procedurally egalitarian bidding on the basis of declared monetary evaluations guarantees that all realized changes of a status quo are in an...

Human decision making is a process guided by different and partly competing motivations that can each dominate behavior and lead to different effects depending on strength and circumstances. 'Over-stylizing' neglects such competing concerns and context-dependence, although it facilitates the...

Due to the shadow of the future, exchange and the division of labor can be self-organizing on a small scale while it seems impossible for large interaction systems. The paper indicates that the survival conditions for trustworthiness can be met even in large interaction systems and large markets...

Standard economic explanations of good conduct in trade rely almost exclusively on future-directed extrinsic motivations induced by material incentives. But intrinsic motives to behave trustworthy and to punish untrustworthiness do support trade. In our model, intrinsically motivated players are...

This paper focuses on the uneasy alliance of rational choice and evolutionary explanations in modern economics. While direct evolutionary explanations of "optimality" rule out "purposeful" rational choice by assuming zero-intelligence and pure rational choice explanations leave no room for...

Medical doctors act as agents of their patients by either treating them directly or referring them to other more or differently specialized doctors, who thereby become "agents of agents". The main aim of this paper is to model central aspects of such two-layered agency relations in the medical...

Retributive responses do play a role in human behavior. Whether they are primarily triggered by supposed intentions or by observed consequences of actions is an important question. It can be addressed by experimental studies of retributive responses in situations in which the individual actor...

In this paper we consider conventions as regularities in behavior which help to solve coordination problems in a society. These problems can be formalized as non-cooperative games with several equilibria. We know that in such situations serious problems of equilibrium selection arise which...

Bereits im Jahre 1980 wählte Horst Albach einen spieltheoretischen und experimentellökonomischen Zugang zum Vertrauensproblem in der Ökonomik. Dieser Weg wird erneut beschritten. Es wird aufgezeigt, dass neuere spieltheoretische und experimentelle Arbeiten nicht nur die explanativen Grenzen...

The so-called paradox of democracy is approached as a variant of a more general class of so-called paradoxes of self-amendment. It is studied from a legal philosophy and a game theoretic point of view. Special attention is devoted to the risks and chances of inducing the foes of democracy to...