Helping somebody may undermine his incentives to work. What Buchanan identified more than 25 years ago as the Samaritan's dilemma is basically a time-inconsistency problem. The paper discusses possible solutions of the dilemma such as punishment within an iterated game, reshaping the game in the...

We take a fresh look at Sophocles’ Antigone by applying a game theoretic analysis – asking whether Antigone was trapped by Creon or whether Creon was trapped by Antigone. Creon, occupant of the throne of Thebes seeking to consolidate his rule decrees that Polynices, his defeated enemy, must...

We experimentally investigate whether individuals can reliably detect cooperators (the nice(r) people) in an anonymous decision environment involving “connected games.†Participants can condition their choices in an asymmetric prisoners’ dilemma and a trust game on past...

We experimentally investigate whether individuals can reliably detect cooperators in an anonymous decision environment by allowing participants to condition their choices in an asymmetric prisoner's dilemma and a trust game (i) on their partner's donation share to a self-selected charity, and...