Trustworthiness can be conveyed by sending a costly signal in advance. In an experiment, we find that the smaller the percentage of trustworthy people in a group, the higher is their percentage of signaling. The introduction of signaling has strong distributional effects. It may be efficient...

Coleman (1990) describes 'calculative trust'. He states that, in order to trust, the value of trust has to be larger than the value of mistrust. So if subjects have (not personally but on average) rational expectations about the trustworthiness of their transaction partners, we should expect the...

No measurement without theory. Ex post inferences from descriptive statistics or regression analyses are often misleading. Although this is well known, it is still a frequent occurrence. In this paper we illustrate the problem by analysing a dataset that appears to suggest that there is a...

Rationales und emotionales Verhalten werden zu Unrecht als vollständige Gegensätze angesehen. Automatisch entstehende Emotionen dienen vielmehr einer oft vorteilhaften Selbstbindung. Objektiv irrationale Drohungen werden glaubhaft, Versprechungen müssen nicht durch kostspielige Verträge oder...