Economics has devoted little attention so far as to whether the type of decision maker matters for economic decisions. However, many important decisions like those on monetary policy or a company’s business strategy are made by (small) groups rather than an individual. We compare behaviour of...

We study the influence of gender on economic decision making in a two-person bargaining game. By testing hypotheses derived from evolutionary psychology and social role theory, we find that (1) gender per se has no significant effect on behavior, whereas (2) gender pairing systematically affects...

In experimental bargaining with incomplete information, we vary the information distribution (symmetric and asymmetric), the direction of electronic prepaycommunication (no, one-way, and two way), and the electronic communication medium (email and video) Bargainig outcomes are influenced by the...

In an overlapping generations-experiment with multiple families participants caneither support their parents directly and thereby reduce their tax burden or hopefor tax-financed old age support. State productivity is captured by the factor withwhich total tax revenues are multiplied to determine...

In this paper we relate individual risk attitude as elicited by binary lotteriesand certainty equivalents to market behavior. By analyzing 26 independentmarkets with a total of 280 participants we show that binary lottery choicesand certainty equivalents are poorly correlated. Only lottery...

We test for behavioral differences between groups and individuals in gift-exchange experiments. Related studies establish group behavior as typically closer to the game-theoretic equilibrium. We show that this result my depend crucially on the decision making procedure within groups. A novel...

We introduce a generalized theoretical approach to study imitation andsubject it to rigorous experimental testing. In our theoretical analysiswe …nd that the different predictions of previous imitation models aredue to different informational assumptions, not to different behavioralrules. It is...

International climate negotiations have so far failed to produce ambitious climate cooperation. We combine laboratory experiments with simulations to investigate the performance of two negotiation design features to address this failure: The Paris Agreement's ratchet-up mechanism, which requires...

There is a substantial literature examining coordination in public goods games. We conducted an experiment to explore how varying patterns of thresholds affect the willingness of subjects to contribute to a public good. We had subjects play a multi-period game where each subject was allocated an...

This paper provides an experimental test of a theory of endogenous network formation. A group of subjects face a decision problem under uncertainty. The subjects are endowed with a private information about the fundamentals of the problem, and they are supposed to make a decision one after the...