Human decision making is a process guided by different and partly competing motivations that can each dominate behavior and lead to different effects depending on strength and circumstances. "Over-stylizing" neglects such competing concerns and context-dependence, although it facilitates the...

This article defines in a precise manner three different mechanisms to achieve impartiality in distributive justice and studies them experimentally. We consider a first-person procedure, the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, and two third-party procedures, the impartial spectator and the ideal...

We use a two-person public goods experiment to distinguish between efficiency and fairness as possible motivations for cooperative behavior. Asymmetric marginal per capita returns allow only the high-productivity player to increase group payoffs when contributing positive amounts. Asymmetric...

Economic theory has evolved without paying proper attention to behavioral approaches, especially to social, economic, and cognitive psychology. This has recently changed by including behavioral economics courses in many doctoral study programs. Although this new development is most welcome, the...

Alphabetic name ordering on multi-authored academic papers, which is the convention in the economics discipline and various other disciplines, is to the advantage of people whose last name initials are placed early in the alphabet. As it turns out, Professor A, who has been a first author more...

A common feature of the literature on the evolution of preferences is that evolution favors nonmaterialistic preferences only if preference types are observable at least to some degree. We argue that this result is due to the assumption that in each state of the evolutionary dynamics some...

Is it possible to elicit reliable assessment from an assessor with conflict of interest (e.g. a professor that writes a recommendation letter for a formal PhD student)? We propose an experimental test and show that compared to a not-incentivized assessment, a promise to give a truthful...

In many different contexts individuals take decisions on the behalf of others. However, little is known about how this circumstance affects the decision making process and influences the ultimate individuals' choices. In this paper, we focus on the context of investment decisions and study if...

Institutional settings and the resulting incentive structures are crucial for economic development. The type of entrepreneurial activity and the entrepreneurial effort are especially dependent on underlying incentive structures. We argue that institutions with better incentive structures for...

In this paper, we introduce the concept of payoff distortion in the standard prisoner's dilemma game when strategies are driven by psychological behaviors. This concept enables to take account each player's assessment of the other player's behavior and the asymmetry of information. We determine...