If the (un)trustworthy are rare, people will talk about them, making their detectionmore reliable and / or less costly. When, however, both types appear in large numbers,detecting (un)trustworthiness will be considerably more difficult and possibly too costly.Based on Güth and Kliemt (2000) we...

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...

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...

Standard economic explanations of good conduct in trade rely almostexclusively on future-directed extrinsic motivations induced by materialincentives. But intrinsic motives to behave trustworthy and to punishuntrustworthiness do support trade. In our model, intrinsically motivatedplayers are...

Medical doctors act as agents of their patients by either treating them directly orreferring them to other more or differently specialized doctors, who therebybecome “agents of agents”. The main aim of this paper is to model centralaspects of such two-layered agency relations in the medical...

Economic intuitions concerning rational behaviour in interactive social situations are shaped byidealized models which are regarded as “approximately true”. But ideal models cannot be meaningfullydeemed approximately true unless asymptotically convergent processes imply them as limit cases....

In this paper we consider conventions as regularities in behavior which help to solve coordinationproblems in a society. These problems can be formalized as non-cooperative games with severalequilibria. We know that in such situations serious problems of equilibrium selection arise whichcannot...

Subjective payoffs that represent given preferences “all things considered” together withstrictly uncommitted opportunity taking cannot account for the behavior of personal actors. It is shown how agent basedapproaches can explicitly capture internal commitments of persons while sticking to...

In plausible theories of bounded rationality actors are not stimulus-response machines but human beings. As such they are guided by theories that predict the course of the world and prescribe how they should try to intervene in that course. Since boundedly rational human beings cannot only...

The main results of our indirect evolutionary approach to trust in large interactions suggest that trsutworthiness must be detectable if good conduct in trust-relationships is to survive. According to theoretical reasoning there is a niche then for an organization offering a possibly costly...