In many economic contexts, an elusive variable of interest is the agent's expectation about relevant events, e.g. about other agents' behavior. Recent experimental studies as well as surveys have asked participants to state their beliefs explicitly, but little is known about the causal relation...

We analyze the choices between two technologies A and B that both exhibit network effects. We introduce a critical mass game in which coordination on either one of the standards constitutes a Nash equilibrium outcome while coordination on standard B is assumed to be payoff-dominant. We present a...

In many economic contexts, an elusive variable of interest is the agent's expectation about relevant events, e.g. about other agents' behavior. Recent experimental studies as well as surveys have asked participants to state their beliefs explicitly, but little is known about the causal relation...

We report and analyze the results of a series of classroom experiments on the voluntary provision of public goods. Using fixed effect panel regression models we find that cooperation significantly increases when participants are forced to guess the degree of overall cooperation. We also find...

In most games, for equilibrium to result, players need to forecast the equilibrium strategies of others. We elicit forecasts of outcomes in a series of hawk-dove (aka chicken) games played by other players. We ask whether these forecasts are consistent with any correlated equilibrium of a class...

In reciprocal interactions, both genuine kindness and self-interested material gain may motivate socially beneficial actions. The paper presents results from two experiments that distinguish the role of perceived motives in reciprocal decision making from the role of outcomes or perceived...

In many economic contexts, an elusive variable of interest is the agent's expectation about relevant events, e.g. about other agents' behavior. Recent experimental studies as well as surveys have asked participants to state their beliefs explicitly, but little is known about the causal relation...

We propose that there are three determinants of sender behavior in trust games: Beliefs re-garding the amounts returned, risk aversion, and reciprocity. Particularly, we are interested in the role of reciprocity because the possibility of negative expected reciprocal utility may lead to...

We explain contributions in public goods games with the help of the reciprocity model of Dufwenberg and Kirchsteiger (2004) by applying some plausible modifications: Most importantly, we assume that subjects overestimate the kindness of their group members. In combination with the finding that...