If the (un)trustworthy are rare, people will talk about them, making their detectionmore reliable and / or less costly. When, however, both types appear in large numbers,detecting (un)trustworthiness will be considerably more difficult and possibly too costly.Based on Güth and Kliemt (2000) we...

The paper presents a linear model of product quality in scientific competition.The only outputs of research are published papers; the onlyinputs are labor and papers by other researchers, which are cited whenused. Researchers compete for status, measured as their rank in a citationscount. If...

This paper examines simple parimutuel betting games under asymmetric information,with particular attention to differences between markets in which bets are submittedsimultaneously versus sequentially. In the simultaneous parimutuel betting market, all(symmetric and asymmetric) Bayesian-Nash...

In a large scale newspaper experiment 5,132 readers of the German weekly, Die Zeit, participated in a three-person bargaining game. In our data analysis we focus on (1) the influence of age, gender, profession and the medium chosen for participation on bargaining behavior and on (2) the external...

Medical doctors act as agents of their patients by either treating them directly orreferring them to other more or differently specialized doctors, who therebybecome “agents of agents”. The main aim of this paper is to model centralaspects of such two-layered agency relations in the medical...

We propose an experimental design allowing a behavioral test of the axiom ofcompleteness of individual preferences. The central feature of our design consistsin enabling subjects to postpone commitment at a small cost. Our main result isthat preferences are significantly incomplete. We use...

Economic intuitions concerning rational behaviour in interactive social situations are shaped byidealized models which are regarded as “approximately true”. But ideal models cannot be meaningfullydeemed approximately true unless asymptotically convergent processes imply them as limit cases....

In this paper we consider conventions as regularities in behavior which help to solve coordinationproblems in a society. These problems can be formalized as non-cooperative games with severalequilibria. We know that in such situations serious problems of equilibrium selection arise whichcannot...

A simple two-person distribution game similar to the ultimatumgame is introduced. However, unlike the standard ultimatumgame, responders can determine the payoff for the proposerin case of rejection. Therefore, they can express their concerns inmonetary quantities. The experimental data are...

It is commonly accepted that face-to-face communication inducescooperation. The experiment disentangles communication and socialeffect (replication of Roth, 1995) and examines the components of thesocial effect with the help of unilateral communication. Results suggestthat separate processes,...