We investigate experimentally whether entry costs have an impact on the evolutionof cooperation in a social dilemma game. In particular, subjects repeatedly playthe so-called takeover game with anonymous partners randomly drawn from a fixedpopulation of participants. The game represents a social...

In line with the widely applied principle of just deserts, we assume that the severityof the penalty on a contract offender increases in the harm on the other. Whenthis principle holds, the influence of the efficiency of the agreement on the incentivesto abide by it crucially depends on whether...

Unlike previous attempts to implement cooperation in a prisoners’ dilemma gamewith an infinite horizon in the laboratory, we focus on extended prisoners’ dilemmagames in which a second (pure strategy) equilibrium allows for voluntary cooperationin all but the last round. Our four main...

This paper studies the effect of introducing costly partner selection for the voluntarycontribution to a public good. Subjects participate in six sequences offive rounds of a two-person public good game in partner design. At the end ofeach sequence, subjects can select a new partner out of six...

We experimentally investigate how affective processes influence proposers’and responders’ behaviour in the Ultimatum Game. Using a dualsystemapproach, we tax cognitive resources through time pressure andcognitive load to enhance the influence of affective processes on behaviour.We find that...

The study of gender differences in social preferences has shown mixedresults, preventing economists and other social scientists from drawingdefinitive conclusions on this topic. Several original investigations andexperimental reviews have hypothesized that the main reason of this heterogeneityof...

Systematic experiments with distribution games (for a survey, see Roth, 1995, ) haveshown that participants are strongly motivated by fairness and efficiency considerations.This evidence, however, results mainly from experimental designs asking directly for sharingmonetary rewards. But even when...

Economic decisions have been shown to depend on actual outcomes as well as perceived intentions. In this paper, we examine wether and how the relative importance of outcomes or intentions for economic decision develops with age. We report the resullt of ultimatum games with children, teens and...

To explain potential sources of wage rigidity this article analyzes a model of reciprocalkindness applied to a repeated ultimatum game with changing and nonzeroconflict payoffs. The model is also tested in a laboratory experiment. The resultsare compatible with the rentsharingapproach to wage...

The authors investigated how the presence or absence of monetary incentives in a prisoner’sdilemma game may influence research outcomes. Specifically, the predictive power of the BigFive personality traits on decisions in an incentivized (N = 60) or hypothetical (N = 60)prisoner’s dilemma...