In a laboratory experiment, we use an extensive form two person trust game to examine the hypothesis that human subjects have a preconscious friend-or-foe (FOF) mental mechanism for evaluating the intentions of another person. Instructions are used to weakly prime the FOF state: instead of the...

We introduce the moonlighting game. Player A can take money from or pass money to player B, who can either return money or punish player A. Thus, our game allows to study both positively and negatively reciprocal behaviour. One-shot experiments were conducted with and without the possibility of...

This paper argues that the notion of focal points is important in understanding bargaining processes. Recent literature confines a discussion of the usefulness of the notion to coordination problems and when bargaining experiments result in outcomes that are inconsistent with a straightforward...

This paper shows that identical offers in an ultimatum game generate systematically different rejection rates depending on the other offers that are available to the proposer. This result casts doubt on the consequentialist practice in economics to define the utility of an action solely in terms...

This paper reports the results of a meta-analysis of 32 papers with results from ultimatum game experiments. We find that on average the proposer offers 40% of the pie to the responder. This share is independent of the size of the pie and of the use of the strategy method. On average 16% of the...

How does an ex ante contract affect behavior in an ex post renegotiation game? We address this question in a canonical buyer-seller relationship with renegotiation. Our paper provides causal experimental evidence that an initial contract has a highly significant and economically important impact...

We study an experiment of the students-proposing deferred acceptance mechanism (DA) in matching markets where firms are matched with students. We investigated the two different situations: (i) Students know firms’ preferences and firms submit their true preference, (ii) Students know firms’...

We modify the Acquiring-a-Company game to study lying in ultimatum bargaining. Privately informed sellers send messages about the alleged value of their company to potential buyers. Via random information leaks, buyers can learn the true value before proposing a price which the seller finally...

We provide causal evidence that patience is a significant source of bargaining power. Generalizing the Rubinstein (1982) bargaining model to arbitrarily non-stationary discounting, we first show that dynamic consistency across bargaining rounds is sufficient for a unique equilibrium, which we...

During the last three decades the ascent of behavioral economics clearly helped to bring down artificial disciplinary boundaries between psychology and economics. Noting that behavioral economics seems still under the spell of the rational choice tradition and, indirectly, of behaviorism we...