During the last three decades the ascent of behavioral economics clearly helped tobring down artificial disciplinary boundaries between psychology and economics.Noting that behavioral economics seems still under the spell of the rational choicetradition – and, indirectly, of behaviorism – we...

Economic theory has evolved without paying proper attention to behavioral approaches,especially to social, economic, and cognitive psychology. This has recently changed byincluding behavioral economics courses in many doctoral study programs. Although thisnew development is most welcome, the...

Does geographic distance or the perceived social distance between subjects significantlyaffect proposer and responder behavior in ultimatum bargaining? To answer this question,subjects play a one-shot ultimatum game with three players (proposer, responder, and apassive dummy player) and...

The common prior assumption justifies private beliefs as posterior probabilities when updatinga common prior based on individual information. Common priors are pervasive in most economicmodels of incomplete information and oligopoly models with asymmetrically informed firms. Wedispose of the...

There is robust field data showing that a frequent and successful way of looking fora job is via the intermediation of friends and relatives. Here we want to explore thisexperimentally. Participants first play a simple public good game with two interactionpartners ("friends"), and share whatever...

Social institutions regulating group conduct have been regarded as necessaryfor human cooperation to transcend family bonds. However, manystudies in economics and biology indicate that reciprocity based on repeatedinteraction suffices to establish cooperation with non-kin. We shedlight on the...

This paper brings together views on choice making as have been developed in philosophy, psychology, and economics. Starting from specific examples the relative merits of different approaches are discussed. The conclusion that models of boundedly rational behavior are the future of social science...

Consistency and optimality together with converse consistency provide an illuminating and novel characterization of the equilibrium concept (Peleg and Tijs, 1996). But (together with non-emptiness) they preclude refinements of the equilibrium notion and selection of a unique equlibrium (norde et...

Whether incentive contracts perform better than trust in terms of productiveefficiency is usually explored by principal-agent experiments (mostinvolving only one agent). We investigate this issue in the context of athree-person ultimatum experiment, which is simpler and more neutrallyframed than...

In a large scale newspaper experiment 5,132 readers of the German weekly, Die Zeit, participated in a three-person bargaining game. In our data analysis we focus on (1) the influence of age, gender, profession and the medium chosen for participation on bargaining behavior and on (2) the external...