Allowing for a free choice of the recipient's gender in a dictator game (N = 508), we find that women show a substantial gender biased towards females. Adding a charity recipient to the possible choices, the charity becomes the primary recipient and overall transfers increase. Yet, conditioning...

Over the last decades, research in behavioural economics has demonstrated that individual welfare (utility), as relevant for economic decision making, depends not only on absolut but also on distributional aspects. Moreover, evidence is gathering that something similar holds for aggregate...

This paper reports results from a classroom dictator game comparing the effects of three different sets of standard instructions. The results show that seemingly small differences in instructions induce fundamentally different perceptions regarding entitlement. Behavior is affected accordingly,...

This paper reports results from a classroom dictator game comparing the effects of three different sets of standard instructions. As was shown by Oxoby and Spraggon (2008), inducing a feeling of entitlement - one subject earning the endowment - strongly affects allocations in dictator games...

It is a well known fact that for any finite extensive form game G there is a strategy profile σ which, together with an appropriate system of beliefs μ, constitutes a sequential equilibrium of G (Kreps and Wilson, 1982). However, as we demonstrate in this paper, there are sequential equilibria...

This paper proposes a simple framework to model contextual influences on procedural decision making. In terms of utility, we differentiate between monetary payoffs and contextual psychological ones, e.g. deriving from the subjects’ normative frame of reference. Monetary payoffs are treated as...

This paper emphasises a potential purely selfish motivation for behavioural altruism. It is based on personal status seeking and the observation that individual status derives also from the groups the individual identifies with. Altruistic behaviour within the group, then, can be rationalised as...

In a first attempt to apply the global games methodology to signalling games, Ewerhart and Wichardt (2004) analyse a beer-quiche type signalling game with additional imperfect information about the preferences of the receiver. Their approach allows them to dismiss the unreasonable pooling on...

A global signaling game is a sender-receiver game in which the sender is only imperfectly informed about the receiver's preferences. The paper considers an economically relevant class of signaling games that possess more than one Perfect Bayesian equilibrium. For this class of games, it is shown...