Many papers have reported behavioral biases in belief formation that come on top of standard game-theoretic reasoning. We show that the processes involved depend on the way participants reason about their beliefs. When they think about what everybody else or another "unspeci fied" individual is...

We conduct a laboratory experiment to explore whether loss aversion applies to social image concerns. First, subjects are ranked publicly in a social image relevant domain, an IQ test, to establish own rank as a within-subject reference point. We then induce an exogenous change in within-subject...

We use an experiment to test the hypothesis that groups consisting of like-minded cooperators are able to cooperate irrespective of punishment and therefore have a lower demand for a costly punishment institution than groups of like-minded free riders, who are unable to cooperate without...

Belief elicitation is important in many different felds of economic research. We show that how a researcher elicits such beliefs-in particular, whether the belief is about the participant's opponent, an unrelated other, or the population of others-affects the processes involved in the formation...

This paper analyzes the determinants of socially responsible investing (SRI) at the individual investor level. We examine data from an incentivized framed field experiment, which was part of a survey among a representative sample of financial decision makers in German households. Thus, we...