This paper presents a formal theory of reciprocity. Reciprocity means that people reward kind actions and punish unkind ones. The theory takes into account that people evaluate the kindness of an action not only by its consequences but also by the intention underlying this action. The theory...

This paper presents four experiments testing the prediction that assignment of contract rights erodes the moral obligation to perform. The first three studies used an experimental laboratory game designed to model contractual exchange. Players in the games were less selfish with a...

Evidence for positive reciprocity, where subjects give more than dictators with the same endowment, has always been rare. We investigate the significant positive reciprocity in a prior experiment which broke a trust game into a 2-stage dictator game. There, the 2nd dictator knew that the 1st...

We show how to bound the effect of belief-dependent preferences on choices in sequential two-player games without information about the (higher-order) beliefs of players. The approach can be applied to a class of belief-dependent preferences which includes reciprocity (Dufwenberg and...

The current research uses the now-classic Trust Game and introduces a new, simultaneous version of the game to investigate whether people display trust as an influence tactic. Purely personal trusting decisions should lead trustors to send equivalent amounts in both versions of the game;...

This study experimentally examines how the generosity of an incentive contract offered by an experimental firm to a pair of employees and a feedback system that provides information on individual employee cooperativeness affect the sustainability of cooperation. Both contract generosity and the...