This paper provides an argument for the advantage of a preference for identity-consistent behaviour from an evolutionary point of view. Within a stylised model of social interaction, we show that the development of cooperative social norms is greatly facilitated if the agents of the society...

This paper proposes a simple mechanism aimed to establish positive contributions to public goods in the absence of powerful institutions to sanction free-riders. The idea of the mechanism is to require players to commit to the public good by paying a deposit prior to the contribution stage. If...

How do people trade off efficiency against equality concerns? To study this question, we conducted a modified mini ultimatum game (N=120) in which proposers were asked to choose between offering 8:2 and y:y, y∈{5, 4.5, 4,.., 0.5}; all offers in Euro. According to the data, 58 of 60 proposers...

This paper proposes a simple two-stage mechanism to establish positive contributions to public goods in the absence of powerful institutions to provide the public good and to sanction free-riders. In this mechanism players commit to the public good by paying a deposit prior to the contribution...

This paper proposes a comprehensive perspective on the question of self-enforcing solutions for normal form games. While this question has been widely discussed in the literature, the focus is usually either on strict incentives for players to stay within the proposed solution or on strategic...

This paper reports results from a classroom dictator game comparing the effects of three different sets of standard instructions. As was shown by Oxoby and Spraggon (2008), inducing a feeling of entitlement (one subject earning the endowment) strongly affects allocations in dictator games...