Applying an evolutionary framework, we investigate how a reputation mechanism and abuyer insurance (as used on Internet market platforms such as eBay) interact to promote trustworthinessand trust. Our analysis suggests that the costs involved in giving reliable feedbackdetermine the gains from...

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 my...

Fairness is a strong concern as shown by dictator and ultimatum experiments. Efficiency, measured by the sum of individual payoffs, is a potentially competing concern in games such as the prisoners' dilemma. In our experiment participants can increase efficiency by gift giving. In the one-sided...

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...

In experimental bargaining with incomplete information, we vary the information distribution (symmetric and asymmetric), the direction of electronic prepaycommunication (no, one-way, and two way), and the electronic communication medium (email and video) Bargainig outcomes are influenced by the...

A great deal of late bidding has been observed on internet auctions such as ebay, which employ a second price auction with a fixed deadline. Much less late bidding has been observed on internet auctions such as those run by Amazon, which employ similar auction rules, but use an ending rule that...

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

What we now label as "fair behavior" often differs from philopsophical norions of the concept. Establishing a clear understanding of the empirical nature of fairness is important if we are to gauge teh impact fairness has on economic and political institutions.[...]

Many bidders in eBay employ bidding strategies that involve late bids, incremental bids, or both. Based on field evidence, we discuss teh manner in which late bids are caused both by sophisticated, strategic reasoning and by irrationality and inexperience, the interaction of late bidding and...

Auctions on the Internet provide a new source of data on how bidding is influenced by the detailed rules of the auction. Here we study the second-price auction run by eBay and Amazon, in which a bidder submits a reservation price, and has this (maximum) price used to bid for him by proxy.[...]