This chapter defines various social distances as the degree of reciprocity that people believe is inherent within a social interaction. The greater the social distance, or isolation, between a person and others, the weaker is the scope for reciprocal relations. This chapter conjecture that the...

The current cultural norms with regard to sharing, cooperation, trust, and punishment are the result of 23 million years of evolution and adaptation. During most of those 23 million years, humans lived in small interactive groups and developed behaviors and strategies to promote cooperation and...

The emergence of empirical evidence suggesting divergence between the willingness- to-accept (WTA), for the sale of an object, and the willingness-to-pay (WTP), for the purchase of an object, has resulted in two explanations. Further they argue that the endowment effect will not apply when the...

This chapter compare hypothetical with actual bids of a Treasury bill dealer, and find that the dealer's measure of constant relative risk aversion using actual bid data is four times larger than under hypothetical assessment. This chapter also reports individual decision making experiments in...