To explain why pre-play communication increases cooperation in games, one refers to a) strategic causes such as efficient communication or reputation effects, and b) changes in the utilities due to social processes. Hitherto experimental support for both explanations is mixed and confounded. Our...

A cyclical network of indirect reciprocity is derived organizing 3- or 6-person groups into rings of social interaction where the first individual can help the second, the second the third, and so on till the last, who in return can help the first. Mutual cooperation is triggered by assuming...

The goal of this paper is to provide an overview on the Virtual Laboratory infrastructure for online economic experiments. We summerize our experience gained from performing serveral economic experiments on the Internet. The experiments we have run range from electronic markets to individual...

We discuss several issues of organizing economic laboratory experiments like subject pool, recruitment, scheduling and show how we solved them with the help of the Online Recruitment System for Economic Experiments (ORSEE). This paper may serve as a manual for the system. A test system has been...

This paper revisits and extends the experiment on the solidarity game by Selten and Ockenfels (1998). We replicate the basic design of the solidarity game and extend it in order to t test the robustness of the ‘fixed total sacrifice’ effect and the applied strategy method. Our results only...