We test the assumption that preferences are unchanged throughout a strategic game in the absence of feedback. To do so, we study the relationship between the strategic nature of a game and players' identification in social groups. We present evidence that the strategic nature of the game affects...

Substantial evidence has accumulated in recent empirical works on the limited ability of the Nash equilibrium to rationalize observed behavior in many classes of games played by experimental subjects. This realization has led to several attempts aimed at finding tractable equilibrium concepts...

While numerous experiments demonstrate how pro-sociality can influence economic decision-making, evidence on explicitly anti-social economic behavior has thus far been limited. In this paper we investigate the importance of spite in experimental rent-seeking contests. Although, as we show,...

Using the classic moral hazard problem with limited liability we characterize the optimal incentive contracts when first an other-regarding principal interacts with a self-regarding agent. The optimal contract differs considerably when the principal is ‘inequity averse’ vis-a-vis the...

In a multi-agent setting, individuals often compare own performance with that of their peers. These comparisons in?uence agents? incentives and lead to a noncooperative game, even if the agents have to complete independent tasks. I show that depending on the interplay of the peer effects,...

In this paper, I contrast the effects of individual and spousal disability on subjective well-being and labor supply using data on couples from the German Socio-Economic Panel for the years 1984–2006. I find almost no effects in terms of labor market outcomes for both men and women, which...

We study the impact of coupling a decision maker’s lottery payoffs to those of a peer on the preferred level of risk by means of a lab experiment. Compared to the benchmark where the lotteries are paid off individually, symmetrically coupled payoffs increase the willingness to take risks,...