It is common in studies of individual choice behavior to report averages of the behavior under consideration. In the social sciences the mean is, indeed, often the quantity of interest, but at times focusing on the mean can be misleading. For example, it is well known in labor economics that...

Controversy exists about the act of giving as altruistic instead of self-interested behavior. Each side of this argument interprets similar results from similar experiments in diff erent ways. One side argues the results show that the appearance of altruistic behavior can be explained by...

The effectiveness of monetary policy depends, to a large extent, on market expectations of its future actions. In a standard New Keynesian business-cycle model with rational expectations, systematic monetary policy reduces the variance of inflation and the output gap by at least two-thirds....

This study explores the effect of several personal religion-related variables on social behaviour, using three paradigmatic economic games: the dictator (DG), ultimatum (UG), and trust (TG) games. A large carefully designed sample of a Spanish urban adult population (N=766) is employed. From...

The authors show how the influence of extrinsic random signals depends on the noise structure of these signals. They present an experiment on a coordination game in which extrinsic random signals may generate sunspot equilibria. They measure how these signals affect behavior. Sunspot equilibria...

Anecdotal, empirical, and experimental evidence suggests that offering extrinsic rewards for certain activities can reduce people's willingness to engage in those activities voluntarily. We propose a simple rationale for this 'crowding out' phenomenon, using standard economic arguments. The...

We examine trust and trustworthiness of individuals with varying professional preferences and experiences. Our subjects study business and economics in Frankfurt, the financial center of Germany and continental Europe. In the trust game, subjects with a high interest in working in the financial...

This paper describes how to implement and run a game for teaching the principles of money and banking to an undergraduate economics class. The game primarily deals with the market for loanable funds, but numerous extensions are provided to cover topics such as monetary policy, the tools of the...