This paper reports results from a classroom dictator game comparing the effects of three different sets of standard instructions. The results show that seemingly small differences in instructions induce fundamentally different perceptions regarding entitlement. Behavior is affected accordingly,...

Over the last decades, research in behavioural economics has demonstrated that individual welfare (utility), as relevant for economic decision making, depends not only on absolut but also on distributional aspects. Moreover, evidence is gathering that something similar holds for aggregate...

Allowing for a free choice of the recipient's gender in a dictator game (N = 508), we find that women show a substantial gender biased towards females. Adding a charity recipient to the possible choices, the charity becomes the primary recipient and overall transfers increase. Yet, conditioning...

Integrating individual inequity aversion into a utilitarian social welfare function, we derive a simple welfare measure which comprises both GDP and income inequality as measured by the Gini-index. The provided theoretical link between inequity aversion (popular in behavioural microeconomics)...

This paper compares two prominent empirical measures of individual risk attitudes - the Holt and Laury (2002) lottery-choice task and the multi-item questionnaire advocated by Dohmen, Falk, Huffman, Schupp, Sunde and Wagner (forthcoming) - with respect to (a) their within-subject stability over...

In this paper, we study the individual payoff effects of overconfident self-perception in teams. In particular, we demonstrate that the welfare of an overconfident agent in a team of one rational and one overconfident agent or a team of two overconfident agents can be higher than that of the...

This paper considers the effects of an interim performance evaluation on the decision of a principal to delegate authority to a potentially biased but better informed agent. Assuming the agents' outside option to be determined by market beliefs about their type, interim evaluations (a) provide a...

How do people trade off efficiency against equality concerns? To study this question, we conducted a modified mini ultimatum game (N=120) in which proposers were asked to choose between offering 8:2 and y:y, y∈{5, 4.5, 4,.., 0.5}; all offers in Euro. According to the data, 58 of 60 proposers...

How can an argument that is based on assumptions known to be false deliver any insightful conclusions let alone be used for policy recommendations? Over the years, a variety of concerns regarding (micro-)economic modelling and its relevance for real life have been expressed along these lines....

This paper reports results from a classroom dictator game comparing the effects of three different sets of standard instructions. As was shown by Oxoby and Spraggon (2008), inducing a feeling of entitlement (one subject earning the endowment) strongly affects allocations in dictator games...