How do actual prisoners solve their proverbial dilemma? In a lab experiment, conducted in a German prison for male juvenile offenders, we find that prisoners are no less cooperative than students in a symmetric two-person prisoner's dilemma. Using data from post-experimental tests, we explain...

When judges or public authorities intervene in citizens' lives, they normally must give explicit reasons. Justification primarily serves the sense of justice. The law's subjects want to understand the intervention. But does justification also have a forward-looking effect? Are individuals more...

Legal realists expect prosecutors to be selfish. If they get the defendant convicted, this helps them advance their careers. If the odds of winning on the main charge are low, prosecutors have a second option. They can exploit the ambiguity of legal doctrine and charge the defendant for vaguely...

Sanctions are often so weak that a money maximizing individual would not be deterred. In this paper I show that they may nonetheless serve a forward looking purpose if sufficiently many individuals are averse against advantageous inequity. Using the Fehr/Schmidt model (QJE 1999) I define three...

For decades, experimental economics has been very interested in behavior that could be characterized as practicing solidarity (although the term is rarely used). Solidarity is a key concept in Catholic Social Teaching. This paper builds a bridge between these two endeavors that, thus far, had...

We investigate the external validity of giving in the dictator game by using the misdirected letter technique in a within-subject design. First, subjects participated in standard dictator games (double blind) conducted in labs in two different studies. Second, after four to five weeks (study 1)...

We study a decision maker (DM) who has preferences over choice problems, which are sets of payoff-allocations between herself and a passive recipient. An example of such a set is the collection of possible allocations in the classic dictator game. The choice of an allocation from the set is...

Recent theories of fairness (e.g., Bolton & Ockenfels, 2000; Fehr & Schmidt, 1999) have typically used the assumption of ex ante known pie size. Here I explore theoretically the ramifications of pie size being unknown ex ante. Using a simple allocation problem known as dictator game, I find that...