Social-psychological research reveals two opposite ways in which a person can respond to increased feelings of uncertainty in decision-making. First, he (or she) may try to reduce his uncertainty by searching for more specific information. This leads to less stereotyping and discrimination....

Economic theory argues that competition can diminish discrimination in the labor market, while arguments from social psychology’s social-identity theory point into the opposite direction. We ran two experiments to test the psychological predictions in an ‘economic’ setting. Participants...

This is a study about the possibility of self-governance. We designed two versions of a step-level public good game, with or without a centralized sanctioning mechanism (CSM). In a baseline treatment participants play 14 rounds of the non-CSM game. In an automatic removal (AR) treatment...

We examine gender differences in trust in another party?s cooperation (CC) or its ability (AC). While men and women do not differ concerning trust in cooperation, gender has a strong influence when trust in another subject?s ability is required.

Imitating the best strategy from the previous period has been shown to be an important heuristic, in particular in relatively complex environments. In this experiment we test whether subjects are more likely to use imitation if they are under stress. Subjects play a repeated Cournot oligopoly....

Social-psychological research reveals two opposite ways in which a person can respond to increased feelings of uncertainty in decision-making. First, he (or she) may try to reduce his uncertainty by searching for more specific information. This leads to less stereotyping and discrimination....

Women often receive lower wages than men for comparable work. Many explanations are offered for this fact, ranging from women’s lower negotiation skills to discrimination by employers. In this paper, an experiment, which was originally conceptualized to test efficiency-wage theory, has been...

Imitating the best strategy from the previous period has been shown to be an important heuristic, in particular in relatively complex environments. In this experiment we test whether subjects are more likely to use imitation if they are under stress. Subjects play a repeated Cournot oligopoly....

There is ample evidence that women do not react to competition as men do and are less willing to enter a competition than men. In this paper, we use personality variables to understand the underlying motives of women (and men) to enter a competition or avoid it. We use the Big Five personality...

We examine experimentally two different types of trust: trust in another party’s cooperation and trust in ability. In the cooperation condition, player A sends x ? {0, X} to player B. The amount x is multiplied by c = 3, and B can return y ? {0,3x}. In the ability condition, c depends on B’s...