Trust is an important driver of economic transactions, but how do people decide whom to trust? We conduct an experiment to investigate whether people are able to predict trustworthiness by judging the face of a stranger. The behavior of the second player in the Trust Game is used as a measure of...

We use machine learning to uncover regularities in the initial play of matrix games. We first train a prediction algorithm on data from past experiments. Examining the games where our algorithm predicts correctly, but existing economic models don't, leads us to add a parameter to the best...

Using a repeated public good game with stranger matching, we compare how two different reputation systems with endogenous evaluations affect rates of cooperation. Contributions are public information and each participant evaluates her partner's contribution. At the beginning of each period,...

We conducted a set of experiments to compare the effect of ambiguity in single person decisions and games. Our results suggest that ambiguity has a bigger impact in games than in ball and urn problems. We find that ambiguity has the opposite effect in games of strategic substitutes and...

The paper analyzes the role of the structure of communication - i.e. who is talking with whom - on the choice of messages, on their credibility and on actual play. We run an experiment in a three-player coordination game with Pareto ranked equilibria, where a pair of agents has a profitable...

Although the role of formal and informal institutions in promoting economic growth and sustaining exchange relations is now well established, explaining and differentiating how informal and formal rules affect individual behavior remain a challenge. This study aims to distill the essential...

We propose that there are three determinants of sender behavior in trust games: Beliefs re-garding the amounts returned, risk aversion, and reciprocity. Particularly, we are interested in the role of reciprocity because the possibility of negative expected reciprocal utility may lead to...

The paper analyzes the role of the structure of communication -- i.e., who is talking with whom -- on the choice of messages, on their credibility and on actual play. We run an experiment in a three-player coordination game with Pareto ranked equilibria, where a pair of agents has a profitable...