We investigate the role of intentions in two-player two-stage games. For this purpose we systematically vary the set of opportunity sets the first mover can chose from and study how the second mover reacts not only to opportunities of gains but also of losses created by the choice of the first...

Narratives pervade almost any aspect of our life and play a particularly important role in moral and prosocial decision-making. We study how positive (stories in favor of a prosocial action) and negative (stories in favor of a selfish action) narratives influence prosocial behavior. Our main...

For the trust game, recent models of belief-dependent motivations make opposite predictions regarding the correlation between back-transfers and second- order beliefs of the trustor: While reciprocity models predict a negative correlation, guilt-aversion models predict a positive one. This paper...

In settings where other-regarding motives are likely to be (and some would argue, should be) at the forefront of our minds, how much of our behavior can still be explained by narrow pecuniary self-interest by itself? In an experiment where subjects are asked to vote between two income...

This paper proposes a novel explanation for the context dependency of individual choices in two-player games. Context dependency refers to the well-established phenomenon that a player, when choosing from a given opportunity set created by the other player's strategy, chooses differently in...

We study individuals who can choose how to compete with an opponent for one nonzero payoff. They can either nudge themselves into a fair set of rules where they have the same information and actions as their opponent, or into unfair rules where they spy, sabotage or fabricate their opponent's...

This paper studies the evolution of both characteristics of reciprocity - the willingness to reward friendly behavior and the willingness to punish hostile behavior. Firstly, preferences for rewarding as well as preferences for punishing can survive evolution provided individuals interact within...

There has been an increasing interest in altruistic behaviour in the domain of losses recently. Nevertheless, there is no consensus in whether the monetary losses make individuals more generous or more selfish. Although almost all relevant studies rely on a dictator game to study altruistic...

We experimentally investigated the effects of the possibility of taking in the dictator game and the choices of passive players between the dictator game and the taking game on the distribution decisions of active players. Our main findings support our hypothesis: when the dictator game is not...