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...

There is a general consensus that the root cause of the most recent turmoil in the domestic and global markets is due to a failure in our regulatory system. Yet, Congress has not supported comprehensive regulation related to the day-to-day activities of mortgage brokers and their relationship...

What on earth are economic theorists like me trying to accomplish? The paper discusses four dilemmas encountered by an economic theorist: i) the dilemma of absurd conclusions: should we abandon a model if it produces absurd conclusions or should we regard a model as a very limited set of...

„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...

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...

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...