This paper examines the determinants of informal sanctions by a large number of experiments.

This paper underlines that reciprocity has powerful implications for many economic fields. [editors EconBiz].

In this paper we show that reputation formation in endogenously formed relationships is a decisive determinant for the existence and performance of credit markets. In theabsence of any third party enforcement of debt repayment the contracting parties succeed in establishing stable bilateral...

While the debate on how economic agents form expectations and how these expectationsshould be modelled has been key to modern macroeconomics, money illusion has been ananathema to macroeconomists until recently. The rational expectations revolution in the1970's thoroughly banned the study of...

For decades economists have considered money illusion aslargely irrelevant. Here we show, however, that money illusion haspowerful effects on equilibrium selection. If we represent payoffs innominal terms almost all subjects play at or close to an inefficientequilibrium whereas if we lift the...

There is abundant evidence that many individuals violate the rationality assumptions routinely made in economics. However, powerful evidence also indicates that violations of individual rationality do not necessarily refute the aggregate predictions of standard economic models that assume full...

The evidence from many experiments suggests that people are heterogeneous with regard to their abilities to make rational, forward looking, decisions. This raises the question when the rational types are decisive for aggregate outcomes and when the boundedly rational types shape aggregate...

Transitivity is perhaps the most fundamental choice axiom and, therefore, almost all economic models assume that preferences are transitive. The empirical literature has regularly documented violations of transitivity, but these violations pose little problem as long as they are simply a result...

In many markets, firms make their products complex through add-on features, thus making them difficult to evaluate and compare. Does this product obfuscation lure buyers into buying overpriced products, and if so, why does competition not eliminate this practice? More generally, under which...

We review the vast literature on social preferences by assessing what is known about their fundamental properties, their distribution in the broader population, and their consequences for important economic and political behaviors. We provide, in particular, an overview of the empirically...