Bereits im Jahre 1980 wählte Horst Albach einen spieltheoretischen und experimentellökonomischenZugang zum Vertrauensproblem in der Ökonomik. Dieser Weg wird erneutbeschritten. Es wird aufgezeigt, dass neuere spieltheoretische und experimentelle Arbeitennicht nur die explanativen Grenzen des...

Medical doctors act as agents of their patients by either treating them directly orreferring them to other more or differently specialized doctors, who therebybecome “agents of agents”. The main aim of this paper is to model centralaspects of such two-layered agency relations in the medical...

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

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...

We study ultimatum and dictator experiments where the first moverchooses the amount of money to be distributed between the playerswithin a given interval, knowing that her own share is fixed. Thus, thefirst mover is faced with scarcity, but not with the typical trade-off betweenher own and the...

Whether behavior converges toward rational play or fair play in repeated ultimatum games depends on which player yields first. If responders concede first by accepting low offers, proposers would not need to learn to offer more, and play would converge toward unequal sharing. By the same token,...

In generosity games, one agreement payo is exogenously given,whereas the other is endogenously determined by the proposer's choice of the"pie" size. This has been shown to induce pie choices which are either efficiencyor equality seeking. In our experiment, before playing the generosity...

We study two person-betting games with inconsistent commonly know beliefs, using an experimentalapproach. In our experimental games, participants bet against one another, each bettorchoosing one of two possible outcomes, and payoff odds are know at the time bets are placed.Bettors’ beliefs are...

Unlike previous attempts to implement cooperation in a prisoners’ dilemma gamewith an infinite horizon in the laboratory, we focus on extended prisoners’ dilemmagames in which a second (pure strategy) equilibrium allows for voluntary cooperationin all but the last round. Our four main...

We study interaction effects between intra-firm conflicts and interfirm competitionon a duopolistic market with seller firms employing one or more agents and imple-menting tournament incentives. We show that inter-firm competition leads to higherincentive intensity, higher efforts and output...