The goal of this paper is to show how adding behavioral components to micro-foundated models of macroeconomics may contribute to a better understanding of real world phenomena. The authors introduce the reader to variations of the Keynesian Beauty Contest (Keynes, The General Theory of...

The great recession (2008) triggered an apparent discrepancy between empirical findings and macroeconomic models based on rational expectations alone. This gap led to a series of recent developments of a behavioral microfoundation of macroeconomics combined with the underlying experimental and...

Trust is an essential component of good social outcomes and effective economic performance. This is particularly true in environments such as the Prisoner's Dilemma or standard public-goods games, where the equilibrium in a one-shot case involves strictly uncooperative behavior. Evolutionary...

We experimentally study behavior in a simple voting game where players have private information about their preferences. With random matching, subjects overwhelmingly follow the dominant strategy to exaggerate their preferences, which leads to inefficiency. We analyze an exogenous linking...

We report experimental evidence on the effect of observability of actions on bank runs. We model depositors' decision-making in a sequential framework, with three depositors located at the nodes of a network. Depositors observe the other depositors' actions only if connected by the network....

This paper extends choice theory by allowing for the interaction between cognitive costs and imitative dynamics. The authors experimentally investigate the role of imitation when participants face a task which is costly in cognitive terms. In order to disentangle different choice dynamics, they...

We conduct a modified dictator game in order to analyze the role self-image concerns play in other-regarding behavior. While we generally follow Konow (2000), a cognitive dissonance-based model of other-regarding behavior in dictator games, we relax one of its assumptions as we allow for...

There is an asymmetry regarding what previous decisions depositors may observe when choosing whether to withdraw or keep the money deposited: it is more likely that withdrawals are observed. We study how decision-making changes if depositors are able to make their decision to keep their funds in...

By now there is substantial experimental evidence that people make use of "moral wiggle room" (Dana et al., 2007), that is, they tend to exploit moral excuses for selfish behavior. However, this evidence is limited to dictator games. In our experiment, a trust game variant, we study whether...

We analyze reciprocal behavior when moral wiggle room exists. Dana et al. (2007) show that giving in a dictator game is only partly due to distributional preferences as the giving rate drops when situational excuses for selfish behavior are provided. Our binary trust game closely follows their...