We study the behavior of football (soccer) agents in the German Bundesliga. Referees are requested to act as impartial agents. However, they may be tempted to allocate benefits and rewards in a biased way. Agency theory has long neglected this form of malfeasance of economic agents,but has...

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...

Trust that suppliers and buyers will keep their word is a necessary ingredient to a wellfunctioning marketplace. Nowhere is the issue trickier than for electronic markets, wheretransactions tend to be geographically diffuse and anonymous, putting them out of the reach ofthe legal safeguards and...

Online reputation -"feedback"- mechanism aim to mitigate the moral hazard problem associated with spatially distant exchange among strangers by providing traders with the type of information available in small groups, where members are frequently involved in another's dealings. We compare...

This paper focuses on the uneasy alliance of rational choice and evolutionary explanations in modern economics. While direct evolutionary explanations of "optimality" rule out "purposeful" rational choice by assuming zero-intelligence and pure rational choice explanations leave no room for...

The indirect evolutionary approach integrates forward-looking evaluation of opportunitiesand adaptation in the light of the past. Subjective motivation determines behavior,but long-run evolutionary success of motivational types depends on objective factors only.This can justify intrinsic...

It has been claimed that people often prefer equity-like considerations and tend to ignore strategic aspects in fair division problems. Here, this is explored by analyzing whether or not such behavioral disposition is evolutionary stable. The answer however is ambiguous: Both, reacting to and...

In diesem Beitrag lassen wir herkömmliche Kritikpunkte an der ökonomischen Neo-Klassik Revue passieren und untersuchen, inwieweit die heutige experimentelle Ökonomik diesen durch gesteigerte Realwissenschaften entgeht. Eine induktive Vorgehensweise, bei der im Labor Ergebnisse unter...

Whether incentive contracts perform better than trust in terms of productiveefficiency is usually explored by principal-agent experiments (mostinvolving only one agent). We investigate this issue in the context of athree-person ultimatum experiment, which is simpler and more neutrallyframed than...

Economists usually treat human behavior as being determined by the shadow of the future, while most other social scientists point to the shadow of the past. This paper considers experimental evidence relevant to the controversy and tries to reconcile both explanations of human behavior with each...