Different to other scientific disciplines traditional economic theory has remained remarkably silent about procedural aspects of strategic interactions. Much to the contrast, among psychologists there is by now a broad consensus that not only expected outcomes shape human behavior, but also...

Empirical evidence suggests that parents with higher levels of education generally attach a higher importance to the education of their children. This implies an intergenerational chain transmitting the attitude towards the formation of human capital from one generation to the next. We...

It is a persistent finding in psychology and experimental economics that people's behavior is not only shaped by outcomes but also by decision-making procedures. In this paper we develop a general framework capable of modelling these procedural concerns. Within the context of psychological games...

Empirical evidence suggests that parents with higher levels of education generally also attach a higher importance to the education of their children. This implies an intergenerational chain transmitting the attitude towards the formation of human capital from one generation to the next. We...

We show that individuals’ desire to protect their self-esteem against ego-threatening feedback can mitigate moral hazard in environments with purely subjective performance evaluations. In line with evidence from social psychology we assume that agents’ react aggressively to evaluations by...

Randomized controlled trials (RCT) have become a dominant empirical tool in applied economics. The internal validity of RCTs crucially depends on the (implicit) assumption that the procedure assigning subjects to treatment and control groups has no effect on behavior. We show theoretically that...

People infer causes and assign responsibilities for situations they find themselves in. In contradiction with classical presumptions about human behavior, it has been found that the assignment of responsibilities influences people's perceptions about the (un)kindness of others. Kindness...

We conduct a laboratory experiment with agents working on and principals benefiting from a real effort task in which the agents’ effort/performance can only be evaluated subjectively. Principals give subjective performance feedback to agents and agents have an opportunity to sanction...

Building on Battigalli and Dufwenberg (2009)'s framework of dynamic psychological games and the recent progress in the modeling of dynamic unawareness, we provide a general framework that allows for `unawareness' in the strategic interaction of players motivated by belief-dependent psychological...

Because of its relation to economic growth, there is a policy interest in mea- suring social capital and average trust as its currently most important proxy. Thereby a main focus is determining its variation across groups with different individual characteristics. In this paper we combine the...