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 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 conduct a laboratory experiment with a constant-sum sender-receiver game to investigate the impact of individuals' first- and second-order beliefs on truth-telling. While senders are more likely to lie if they expect the receiver to trust their message (which is in line with expected payoff...

We invited "residents" of a virtual world who vary in real-world age and occupation to play a trust game with stakes comparable to "in world" wages. In different treatments, the lab wall was adorned with an emotively suggestive photograph, a suggestive text was added to the instructions, or both...

Bracketing is a mental procedure about how people deal with multiple tasks. If a decision maker handles all the tasks at the same time, it is called broad bracketing. If she handles the tasks separately, e.g., one or a few tasks each time, it is called narrow bracketing. This paper...

We conduct an experiment on the impact of feedback in the Trust Game. In our treatment group, the Trustee has the opportunity to give feedback to the Investor (free in choice of wording and contents). The feedback option is found to reduce the share of Investors who sent no resources to the...

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 investigate whether there is a link between conditional cooperation and betrayal aversion. We use a public goods game to classify subjects by type of contribution preference and by belief about the contributions of others; and we measure betrayal aversion for different categories of subject....

We study a laboratory social dilemma game in which incentives to steal from others lead to the socially inefficient diversion of resources from production unless the members of a given mini-society can abide by norms of non-theft or engage in low cost collective protection of their members'...