The question of whether lawyers and managers behave selfishly or fairly has inspired discussion for a long time. Empirical evidence, however, is sparse. Using data from an experiment with 359 law and business administration students, we investigate this question empirically and provide first...

For decades, experimental economics has been very interested in behavior that could be characterized as practicing solidarity (although the term is rarely used). Solidarity is a key concept in Catholic Social Teaching. This paper builds a bridge between these two endeavors that, thus far, had...

Many experimental studies report that economics students tend to act more selfishly than students of other disciplines, a finding that received widespread public and professional attention. Two main explanations that the existing literature offers for the differences found in the behavior...

Departures from self-interest in economic experiments have recently inspired models of ?social preferences?. We design a range of simple experimental games that test these theories more directly than existing experiments. Our experiments show that subjects are more concerned with increasing...

In this paper we propose to account for the observed behavior of players in the Ultimatum Game by a new thesis. According to this, players are motivated by both fairness and self-regarding concerns in this game, but they do not have at their disposal a principle that could trade-off one...

Participants in experimental games typically can only choose actions, without making comments about other participants' future actions. In sequential two-person games, we allow first movers to express a preference between responder choices. We find that responder behavior differs substantially...

Economists and psychologists argue that individuals skew personal beliefs to accord with their own interests. To test for the presence of self-serving beliefs, we surveyed 1,200 members of the Mormon church about their practice of tithing. A tithe is a voluntary contribution equal to ten percent...

This paper reports the results of an experimental investigation which allows a deeper insight into the nature of social preferences amongst organized criminals and how these differ from "ordinary" criminals on the one hand and from the non‐criminal population in the same geographical area on...

This paper investigates the driving forces behind informal sanctions in cooperation games and the extent to which theories of fairness and reciprocity capture these forces. We find that cooperators' punishment is almost exclusively targeted towards the defectors but the latter also impose a...

This paper considers a model of incomplete information with selfish rational types and types who comply with social or moral norms by intrinsic motivation. We explore 'complier optimal norms', which maximize expected average utility of all compliant types given that the norms are commonly known....