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...

Motivated by recent research on survey data, we test the influence of the political regime on social norms under controlled laboratory conditions. Comparing solidarity behavior revealed by East and West Germans in 1995 and 2009, we find that East Germans persistently show much less solidarity...

We study an ultimatum experiment in which the responder does not know the offer when accepting or rejecting. Unconditional veto power leads to acceptances, although proposers are significantly greedier than in standard ultimatum games, and this is anticipated by responders.

Voting is a natural context to investigate how democratic societies balance claims of economic efficiency against claims of distributive equity. We examine data from a series of simple experimental voting games; in each, voters are confronted with two distributional policies, one that promotes...

What we now label as "fair behavior" often differs from philopsophical norions of the concept. Establishing a clear understanding of the empirical nature of fairness is important if we are to gauge teh impact fairness has on economic and political institutions.[...]

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 my...

Several current social utility models posit fairness as a motive for certain types of strategic behavior. The models differ sharply with respect to how fairness is measured. Distribution models measure fairness in terms of relative payoff comparisons. Reciprocal-kindness models measure fairness...

We examine how communication affects cooperation with the help of seven standard public goods experiments that only differ with respect to the medium of pre-play communication. Our treatments include bi-directional and unidirectional communication via (mostly electronic) auditory and/or visual...