Trust beliefs are heterogeneous across individuals and, at the same time, persistent across generations. We investigate one mechanism yielding these dual patterns: false consensus. In the context of a trust game experiment, we show that individuals extrapolate from their own type when forming...

Trust beliefs are heterogeneous across individuals and, at the same time, persistent across generations. We investigate one mechanism yielding these dual patterns: false consensus. In the context of a trust game experiment, we show that individuals extrapolate from their own type when forming...

Various approaches used in Agent-based Computational Economics (ACE) to model endogenously determined interactions between agents are discussed. This concerns models in which agents not only (learn how to) play some (market or other) game, but also (learn to) decide with whom to do that (or not).

In this paper we discuss one of the richest psychological conceptions of individuals – that offered by Sigmund Freud – in relation to rational choice theory. The purpose is twofold. First, we use coordination games to translate some of Freud's ideas into a choice theoretic framework;...

The U.K.'s decision to leave the EU and the voting in of the protectionist Donald Trump to the US presidency has drawn both the UK and the USA into the Nash Trap.U.S. mathematician John Nash (the movie ‘A Beautiful Mind') postulated that Adam Smith's declaration that ‘In competition,...

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...

How do families behave dynamically? We provide a framework for studying economic problems in which family behavior is essential. Our key innovation is the inclusion of imperfectly altruistic agents in an otherwise standard consumption-savings problem with exogenous income risk. This gives rise...

In two-person generosity games the proposer's agreement payoff is exogenously given whereas that of the responder is endogenously determined by the proposer's choice of the pie size. Earlier results for two-person generosity games show that participants seem to care more for efficiency than for...

We expand upon the previous models of inequity aversion of Fehr and Schmidt [1], and Frohlich et al. [2], which assume that dictators get disutility if the final allocation of surplus deviates from the equal split (egalitarian principle) or from the subjects' production (libertarian principle)....

In the Solidarity Game (Selten and Ockenfels, 1998) lucky winners of a lottery can transfer part of their income to unlucky losers. Will losers get smaller transfers if they can be assumed to be (partly) responsible for their zero income because they have chosen riskier lotteries (Trhal and...