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...

Departures from "economic man" behavior in many games in which fairness is a salient characteristic are now well documented in the experimental economics literature. These data have inspired development of models of social preferences that assume agents have preferences for equity and efficiency...

Cognitive dissonance is one of the most influential theories in psychology, and its oldest experiential realization is choice-induced dissonance. In contrast to the economic approach of assuming a person's choices reveal their preferences, psychologists have claimed since 1956 that people alter...

Departures from self-interest in economic experiments have recently inspired models of ?social preferences?. We design a range of simple experimental games that test these theories more directly than existing experiments. Our experiments show that subjects are more concerned with increasing...

Participants in experimental games typically can only choose actions, without making comments about other participants' future actions. In sequential two-person games, we allow first movers to express a preference between responder choices. We find that responder behavior differs substantially...

The authors study the lack of necessity of the transitivity property when representing preference relations. Avoiding transitivity hypothesis, this work offers a vision about the modeling of consumer preference relations which are different from the classic one used in economics pedagogy. The...

There is much debate as to why economics students display more self-interested behavior than other students: whether homo economicus self-select into economics or students are instead “indoctrinated” by economics learning, and whether these effects impact on preferences or beliefs about...

We propose a novel approach to modelling time preferences, based on a cognitive shortcoming of human decision makers: the perception of future events becomes increasingly ?blurred? as the events are pushed further in time. We axiomatise a class of preference representations which can be...

Earlier work has shown that procrastination can be explained by quasi-hyperbolic discounting. We present a model of effort choice over time that shifts the focus away from completion to performance on a single task. We show that quasi-hyperbolic discounting is detrimental for performance. More...

Goals are an important source of motivation. But little is known about why and how people set them. We address these questions in a model based on two stylized facts from psychology and behavioral economics: i) Goals serve as reference points for performance. ii) Present-biased preferences...