There is by now ample evidence from laboratory experiments that individuals exhibit "prosocial" or "other-regarding" preferences. However, a key question is whether the importance of other-regarding preferences documented in the laboratory can be readily generalized to draw conclusions about the...

We experimentally investigate behavior and beliefs in a sequential prisoner's dilemma. Each subject had to choose an action as first-mover and a conditional action as second-mover. All subjects also had to state their beliefs about others' second-mover choices. We find that subjects' beliefs...

This paper studies the impact of inequity aversion preferences (Fehr and Schmidt, 1999) in a "repeated" public goods game. We assume that agents care about the expected payoff differences among themselves over all periods of a game, so that it is in fact a dynamic game that is being played. In...

People often form expectations about others using the lens of their own attitudes (the so-called consensus effect). We study the implications of this for trust and trustworthiness. Trustworthy individuals are more \optimistic" than opportunists and are accordingly less afraid to engage in...

We develop a framework in which individuals' preferences coevolve with their abilities to deceive others about their preferences and intentions. Specifically, individuals are characterised by (i) a level of cognitive sophistication and (ii) a subjective utility function. Increased cognition is...

The assumption that decision makers choose actions to maximize their preferences is a central tenet in economics. This assumption is often justified either formally or informally by appealing to evolutionary arguments. In contrast, this paper shows that in almost every game, payoff maximization...

A coordination game is repeatedly played on a graph by players (vertices) who have heterogeneous cardinal preferences and whose strategy choice is governed by the individualistic asynchronous logit dynamic. The idea of potential driven autonomy of sets of players is used to derive results on the...

We consider the problem of fairly allocating a fixed amount of a perfectly divisible resource among agents with single-dipped preferences. In this problem, it is known that any efficient and strategy-proof rule violates several fairness requirements. We alternatively propose a simple and natural...

Are individuals always better off when their preferences can be represented by expected utility?I study this question in a bargaining game where individuals bargain over a pie of fixed size, and I contrast the share received in the long-run by expected utility maximisers with the share they...

We present a model that investigates preference evolution with endogenous matching. In the short run, individuals’ subjective preferences simultaneously determine who they are matched with and how they behave in the social interactions with their matched partners, which results in material...