This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

We study the impact of social learning on the depth of reasoning in an experimental beauty-contest game. Naive advice and observation of others' decisions as two forms of social learning trigger faster convergence to the equilibrium. We find that subjects who receive advice outperform uninformed...

Knowing when to trust is an essential skill, but little is known about its cognitive development. No previous studies have examined the development of trust while controlling for age differences in altruism. We hypothesized that older children are more likely to trust, and that this age-related...

We test an implication that is common to all prominent theories of outcome-based other-regarding preferences: the ordinal preference ranking of an agent over a finite number of alternatives lying on any straight line in the space of material payoffs to oneself and some other agent must be...

This note presents results from modified dictator games in which the payoff-relevant game is either chosen randomly or by the recipients. We do not observe reciprocal behavior when recipients choose the game: Dictators do not condition their donations on the game chosen by recipients.

It is standard in experimental economics to use decontextualized designs where payoff structures are presented using neutral language. Here we show that cooperation in such a neutrally framed Prisoner’s Dilemma is equivalent to a PD framed as contributing to a cooperative endeavour....

We show that subjects who set their minimum acceptable offer to zero in an ultimatum game are the most generous players in a dictator game. This finding challenges the interpretation of the acceptance of low offers as payoff-maximizing behavior.

We report experimental evidence on the effect of observability of actions on bank runs. We model depositors’ decision-making in a sequential framework, with three depositors located at the nodes of a network. Depositors observe the other depositors’ actions only if connected by the network....

This paper explores the motivations behind punishment from unaffected third parties and affected second parties using a within-subjects design in ten simple games. We apply a classification analysis and find that a parsimonious model assuming that subjects are either inequity averse or selfish...

This paper aspires to fill a conspicuous gap in the literature regarding learning in games—the absence of empirical verification of learning rules involving pattern recognition. Weighted fictitious play is extended to detect two-period patterns in opponentsʼ behavior and to comply with the...