Fairness is a strong concern as shown by dictator and ultimatum experiments. Efficiency, measured by the sum of individual payoffs, is a potentially competing concern in games such as the prisoners' dilemma. In our experiment participants can increase efficiency by gift giving. In the one-sided...

In the framework of expected utility theory, risk attitudes are entirely capturedby the curvature of the utility function. In cumulative prospect theory (CPT) riskattitudes have an additional dimension: the weighting of probabilities. With thismodication, one question arises naturally: since...

Human decision making is a process guided by different and partly competing mo-tivations that can each dominate behavior and lead to different effects depending on strength and circumstances. “Over-stylizing” neglects such competing concerns and context-dependence, although it facilitates...

The satisficing approach is generalized and applied to finite n-person games.Based on direct elicitation of aspirations, we formally define the conceptof satisficing, which does not exclude (prior-free) optimality but includesit as a border case. We also review some experiments on strategic...

Charness et al. (2007b) have shown that group membership has a strong effect on individualdecisions in strategic games when group membership is salient through payoff commonality.In this comment I show that their findings also apply to non-strategic decisions, even when nooutgroup exists, and I...

On a heterogeneous experimental oligopoly market, sellers choose a price,specify a set-valued prior-free conjecture about the others' behavior, andform their own profit-aspiration for each element of their conjecture. Weformally define the concepts of satisficing and prior-free optimality...

Similar to welfare economics where with(out) interpersonal comparisonsone defines unique (set-valued) welfare (Pareto) optima, we present a frameworkfor one-person decision making where with(out) a prior probability distributionindividual optimality prescribes usually a unique (set of)...

In this paper we experimentally test skewness seeking at the individuallevel. Several prospects that can be ordered with respect to the third-degreestochastic dominance (3SD) criterion are ranked by the participants of theexperiment. We find that the skewness of a distribution has a...

The study of gender differences in social preferences has shown mixedresults, preventing economists and other social scientists from drawingdefinitive conclusions on this topic. Several original investigations andexperimental reviews have hypothesized that the main reason of this heterogeneityof...

We perform an experimenta linvestigation using a dictator game inwhich individuals must make a moral decision —to give or not to give anamount of money to poor people in the Third World. A questionnaire inwhich the subjects are asked about the reasons for their decision showsthat, at least in...