Although evidence accrues in biology, anthropology and experimental economics that homo sapiens is a cooperative species, the reigning assumption in economic theory is that individuals optimize in an autarkic manner (as in Nash and Walrasian equilibrium). I here postulate a cooperative kind of...

There is a potential free-rider problem when several siblings consider future provision of care for their elderly parents. Siblings can commit to not providing long- term support by living far away. If location decisions are made by birth order, older siblings may enjoy a first-mover advantage....

To explain why pre-play communication increases cooperation in games,one refers to a) strategic causes such as efficient communication or reputationeffects, and b) changes in the utilities due to social processes. Hithertoexperimental support for both explanations is mixed and confounded....

We set up a two-stage game with sequential moves by one altruistic agent andn selfish agents. The rotten kid theorem states that the altruist can only reach her firstbest when the selfish agents move before the altruist. The Samaritan’s dilemma, on theother hand, states that the altruist can...

We analyze the effects of introducing asymmetric information and expectations in the investment game (Berg et al., 1995). In our experiment, only the trustee knows the size of the surplus. Subjects' expectations about each other's behavior are also elicited. (...)

A common feature of the literature on the evolution of preferencesis that evolution favors nonmaterialistic preferences only if preferencetypes are observable at least to some degree. We argue that this resultis due to the assumption that in each state of the evolutionary dynam-ics some Bayesian...

We investigate a setting in which members of a population, bifurcated into a majority and a minority, transact with randomly matched partners. All members are uniformly altruistic, and each transaction can be carried out cooperatively or through a market mechanism, with cooperative transactions...

The demographic history of the Jews in the Middle Ages may be characterized by two main phenomena: i) a sharp drop in the number of Jews until the beginning of the modern period, due mainly to conversions; and, ii) early urbanization. Until now, these features have been analyzed as primarily...

Psychological game theory can help provide a rational choice explanation of framing effects; frames influence beliefs, beliefs influence motivations. We explain this theoretically, and explore the empirical relevance experimentally. In a 2×2 design of one-shot public good games we show that...

Recent bargaining experiments demonstrated an impact of anonymity and incomplete information on subjects' behavior. This has rekindled the question whether fair behavior is inspired by regard for others or is explained by external forces. To test for the importance of external pressure we...