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...

Can a court system conceivably control opportunistic behavior if judges are selected from the same population as ordinary citizens and thus are no better than "the rest of us"? This paper provides a new and, as we claim, quite profound "rational choice" answer to that unsolved riddle. Adopting...

„Folk economics“ is the economic ‘theory’ of common sense, and analogously „folk ethics“ is the moral ‘theory’ of common sense. Typical of „folk-economic beliefs“ are erroneous causal attributions. Typical of „folk-ethical beliefs“ are utopian or dysfunctional criteria...

I suppose that people react with anger when others show themselves not to be minimally altruistic. With heterogeneous agents, this can account for the experimental results of ultimatum and dictator games. Moreover, it can account for the surprisingly large fraction of individuals who offer an...

This paper reports the results of experiments involving a 3-personcoalitionformation game with an ultimatumbargaining character. The grand coalition was always the efficientcoalition,whereas the values of the 2-personcoalitions are varied such that they lead to an efficiency loss inthe range...

This paper reports the results of experiments involving a 3-person coalition formation game with an ultimatum bargaining character. The grand coalition was always the efficient coalition decision, whereas the values of the 2-person coalitions are varied such that they lead to an efficiency loss...

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...

We introduce the uncertainty of psychological motivation into a reciprocity model and explore its implications on behavior. We extend the Sequential Reciprocity Equilibrium in extensive-form games (Dufwenberg and Kirchsteiger, 2004) to a broader class of incomplete information games. We use this...

To investigate the relationship between the depth of strategic thinking and social preferences we ask subjects in an experiment to perform dictator games and a guessing game. The guessing game measures depth of strategic thinking while dictator games control for social preferences. When...