In many social dilemmas, individuals tend to generate a situation with low payoffs instead of a system optimum (tragedy of the commons). Is the routing of traffic a similar problem? In order to address this question, we present experimental results on humans playing a route choice game in a...

The great recession (2008) triggered an apparent discrepancy between empirical findings and macroeconomic models based on rational expectations alone. This gap led to a series of recent developments of a behavioral microfoundation of macroeconomics combined with the underlying experimental and...

We test experimentally an explanation of over and under confidence as motivated by (perhaps unconscious) strategic concerns, and find compelling evidence supporting this hypothesis in the behavior of participants who send and respond to others ́statements of confidence about how well they have...

This paper experimentally studies two simple interventions aimed at increasing public goods provision in settings in which accurate feedback about contributions is not available. The first intervention aims to exploit lying aversion by requiring subjects to send a non-verifiable ex post...

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...

This paper provides an analytical model to study the co-evolution of trust and trustworthiness in a game-theoretic framework. Trust reflects an agent’s belief that other agents cooperate in a two-stage prisoner’s dilemma game. Altruist agents receive a utility from their opponents’...