Retributive responses do play a role in human behavior. Whether they are primarily triggered by supposed intentions or by observed consequences of actions is an important question. It can be addressed by experimental studies of retributive responses in situations in which the individual actor...

Spieltheoretische Überlegungen zeigen, dass Reputationsmechanismen, wie sie auf Internet-Marktplattformen zur Anwendung kommen, prinzipiell geeignet sind, Handel in großen anonymen Märkten zu erleichtern. Dies gilt selbst dann, wenn die Marktteilnehmer ihre Identität jederzeit und kostenlos...

We report on a research program that employs the indirect evolutionary approach to analyze how the institutional environment drives the evolution of trust and trustworthiness through the evolution of moral preferences, and how in turn the evolution of preferences shapes the evolution of the...

Trust that suppliers and buyers will keep their word is a necessary ingredient to a well functioning marketplace. Nowhere is the issue trickier than for electronic markets, where transactions tend to be geographically diffuse and anonymous, putting them out of the reach of the legal safeguards...

Voting is a natural context to investigate how democratic societies balance claims of economic efficiency against claims of distributive equity. We examine data from a series of simple experimental voting games; in each, voters are confronted with two distributional policies, one that promotes...

Online reputation - "feedback" - mechanisms aim to mitigate the moral hazard problems associated with spatially distant exchange among strangers by providing traders with the type of information available in small groups, where members are frequently involved in one another's dealings. We...

The internet facilitates interactive and asynchronous communication among human and artificial agents in large bilateral markets. As a consequence, new institutional structures are emerging in the new economy. I discuss a few core problems associated with the economic design of internet markets...

Many Internet markets rely on ‘feedback systems’, essentially social networks of reputation, to facilitate trust and trustworthiness in anonymous transactions. Market competition creates incentives that arguably may enhance or curb the effectiveness of these systems. We investigate how...