We show that in symmetric two-player exact potential games, the simple decision rule "imitate-if-better" cannot be beaten by any strategy in a repeated game by more than the maximal payoff difference of the one-period game. Our results apply to many interesting games including examples like 2x2...

Die Diskussion um Karl Marx ist lange Zeit nur ideologisch positionell geführt worden. Wer sich nicht als Gegner oder Befürworter der Marxschen Lehre erklärte, hatte es schwer, in dieser Diskussion Gehör zu finden. Im letzten Viertel des vorigen Jahrhunderts hat jedoch sowohl in...

It is puzzling that India, which has a large domestic constituency of people suffering from underdevelopment, chronic poverty and mal-governance, is emerging as an important aid donor. With the intension of understanding why poor countries provide foreign aid, this article is the first to...

Advice is important for decision making, especially in the financial sector. We investigate how individuals assess risk preferences of others given sociodemographic information or pictures. Both non-professionals and fi nancial professionals participate in this artefactual field experiment....

As illustrated by the famous Ellsberg paradox, many subjects prefer to bet on events with known rather than with unknown probabilities, i.e., they are ambiguity averse. In an experiment, we examine subjects’ choices when there is an additional source of ambiguity, namely, when they do not know...

Recent studies have found correlations between risk attitudes and several sociodemographic characteristics. In this paper, we deploy an artefactual fi eld experiment and study whether subjects - non-professionals and financial professionals - are aware of these correlations. This is largely...

This paper studies the long-run effect of the 2002 changeover on restaurant prices in Germany. German restaurant prices increased significantly when the euro was introduced as a new currency but rather than returning to their re-changeover trend, restaurant prices appear to have stabilized on a...

Does economic freedom increase the utility of an average citizen? Public choice theory in particular has emphasized the shortcomings of governments and voting processes, and the advantages of relying on markets and individual decision making. However, an increasing amount of people are refusing...

In this paper, we consider a decision-maker who tries to learn the distribution of outcomes from previously observed cases. For each observed sequence of cases the decision-maker predicts a set of priors expressing his beliefs about the underlying probability distribution. We impose a version of...

One of the consequences of the euro changeover in 2002 was that for a period of several years people considerably overestimated actual inflation. The goal of this paper is to study whether misperceptions of this kind may have real effects, that is, whether they induce people to alter their...