Fairness in competitive games such as the Ultimatum Game is often defined theoretically. According to some of the literature, in which fairness is determined only based on resource allocation, a proposal splitting resources evenly (i.e., 5:5) is generally assumed as fair, and minimal deviation...

Do White and Black Americans differ in their response to fair versus unfair treatment, and do these reactions depend on whether treatment is intentional? We study an ultimatum game in which we non-deceptively vary three dimensions: racial identities of participants, offer inequality, and whether...

Using a large-scale incentivized trust game experiment conducted across all 27 EU member states, we find that sexual minorities exhibit greater prosocial behaviour toward another vulnerable group but not toward an unknown counterpart, compared to heterosexual individuals. The observed effects...

This ambitious book is the first to present a theoretical framework for a unified analysis of both behavioral and traditional economics. It explores the ultimate factors from an evolutionary perspective in addressing why humans are predictably irrational and proposes "adaptive rationality," a...

This paper studies intertemporal social preferences. We introduce intertemporal dictator and ultimatum games where players decide on the timing of monetary payoffs. The setting is twodimensional rather than one-dimensional, in the sense that inequalities can arise in the time as well as in the...

Experimental studies show that the Nash equilibrium and its refinements are poor predictors of behavior in non-cooperative strategic games. Cooperation models, such as ERC and inequality aversion, yield superior predictions compared to the standard game theory predictions. However, those models...

The social world is often portrayed as being less predictable and more uncertain than the nonsocial world. People may therefore feel the need to search more for information before making a choice. However, we suggest that cognitive tools such as social projection and norm-based expectation may...

The Rwandan government emphasizes the role of cooperatives in transforming rural economies from subsistence farming to diversified commercial agriculture, including high-value export horticultural crops. The success of these cooperatives depends significantly on farmers' willingness to join and...

In prosocial decisions, decision-makers are inherently uncertain about how their decisions impact others' utility - we call this interpersonal uncertainty. We show that people's response to interpersonal uncertainty shapes well-known patterns of prosocial behavior. First, using standard social...

Experiments are an important tool in economic research. However, it is unclear to which extent the control of experiments extends to the perceptions subjects form of such experimental decision situations. This paper is the first to explicitly elicit perceptions of the dictator and trust game and...

Why do people punish experienced unfairness if it induces costs for both the punisher and punished person(s) without any direct material benefits for the punisher? Economic theories of fairness propose that punishers experience disutility from disadvantageous inequality and punish in order to...

In prosocial decisions, decision-makers are inherently uncertain about how their decisions impact others’ utility – we call this interpersonal uncertainty. We show that people’s response to interpersonal uncertainty shapes well-known patterns of prosocial behavior. First, using standard...

An extensive literature documents that people are willing to sacrifice personal material gain to adhere to a moral motive. However, less is known about the psychological mechanisms that operate when two moral motives come into conflict. We hypothesize that individuals adhere to the moral motive...

We implement a binary trust game between 211 married couples from lowincome households in urban India. In a separate experiment, these spouses randomly received either only a joint savings device (control) or, additionally, a device for individual usage (treatment). Combining data from both...

The study’s primary focus is on examining fairness deliberations of bargainers in Germany and in China under symmetric and asymmetric bargaining power to understand whether they incorporate fairness into their decision process and, if so, how this affects bargaining outcomes. To this end, we...

This paper analyzes fairness and bargaining in a dynamic bilateral matching market. Traders from both sides of the market are pairwise matched to share the gains from trade. The bargaining outcome depends on the traders’ fairness attitudes. In equilibrium fairness matters because of market...

We study strategic interaction in an experimental social-preferences vacuum chamber. We mute social preferences by letting participants knowingly interact with computers. Our new design allows for indirect strategic interaction: there are several waves in which computer players inherit the...

Do White and Black Americans differ in their response to fair versus unfair treatment, and do these reactions depend on whether treatment is intentional? We study an ultimatum game in which we non-deceptively vary three dimensions: racial identities of participants, offer inequality, and whether...

We investigate whether a player's guilt aversion is modulated by the co-players' vulnerability. To this goal, we introduce new variations of a three-player Trust game in which we manipulate payoff vulnerability and endowment vulnerability. The former is the traditional vulnerability which arises...

We study ultimatum bargaining games with asymmetric information regarding disagreement payoffs. Results from Mensch (2020) are used to find conditions under which a monotonic equilibrium exists in these games. A standard single crossing assumption implies the existence of a monotonic Nash...

Time preference, emotional "shock sensitivity" and "resilience" are shaping an emotional probability weighting function capable to "replicate" gender specific weighting functions. By maximizing emotional expected utility the proposer (P) and the responder (R) in an ultimatum game are choosing...

In this paper, we devised a randomized experiment, administered to two samples of subjects representative of the entire Italian adult population, to test whether the order of play in two Ultimatum Games influences t he c hoice o f p layers, a nd t he o utcome o f t he g ame. We find that, in the...

We report on a large experiment testing the role of moral preferences in one-shot, anonymous ultimatum and impunity games, which vary the veto power of responders: in the impunity game, if an offer is lower than the responder's minimum acceptable offer, the proposer still receives his share,...

In this paper, we hypothesize that the strength of the consensus effect, i.e., the tendency for people to overweight the prevalence of their own values and preferences when forming beliefs about others' values and preferences, depends on the salience of own preferences. We manipulate salience by...

Principal-agent interactions in which the agent can preemptively signal prosociality can achieve higher levels of trust and reciprocity if both parties care about social esteem (Boulu-Reshef and Kuechle, 2023). However, it is unclear to what extent social esteem is necessary for this outcome. In...

Gender differences have frequently been studied in experimental economics, but the findings remain inconclusive. In this study, we focus on gender differences in expectations and economic behavior in a dictator game, building on Blanckenburg, Iseke and Tebbe (2023). We add to prior work by...

We have used the standard trust game on a random sample of university students (N=764) and a random sample of rural residents (N=834) in Malawi. The study identifies social preference types (Bauer, Chytilov'a, & Pertold-Gebicka, 2014; Fehr, Gl¨atzle-R¨utzler, & Sutter, 2013) and how these relate...