Whether incentive contracts perform better than trust in terms of productiveefficiency is usually explored by principal-agent experiments (mostinvolving only one agent). We investigate this issue in the context of athree-person ultimatum experiment, which is simpler and more neutrallyframed than...

Direct transfers allow heirs to freely use what has been passed on to them. Bequeathers who do not trust their descendants to make proper use of the fortune may prefer investing it in a safe foundation, thereby limiting their descendants’ autonomy. In our study we compare experimentally these...

We report on an experiment designed to explore the interrelation of otherregardingconcerns with attitudes towards risk and delay when the latterhave a social dimension, i.e., pertain to one's own and another person'spayos. For this sake, we compare evaluations of several prospects, eachof which...

Idiosyncratic risk attitudes are usually assumed to be commonly knownand restricted to own payos. However, the alternatives faced by a decisionmaker often involve risks for others' payos as well. Motivated by theimportance of other-regarding preferences in social interactions, this paperexplores...

In one-shot investment game experiments where each player's payo is a convexcombination of own and other's prot, trust remains unaected by the extent of interdependencewhereas trustworthiness reacts positively to it.

The present research experimentally examines the ininfluence of groupidentity on trust behavior in an investment game. In one treatment,group identity is manipulated only through the creation of artificial(minimal) groups. In other treatments group members are additionallyrelated by outcome...

We study ultimatum and dictator experiments where the first moverchooses the amount of money to be distributed between the playerswithin a given interval, knowing that her own share is fixed. Thus, thefirst mover is faced with scarcity, but not with the typical trade-off betweenher own and the...

We analyze the effects of introducing asymmetric information and expectations in the investment game (Berg et al., 1995). In our experiment, only the trustee knows the size of the surplus. Subjects’ expectations about each other’s behavior are also elicited. Our results show that average...

This paper revisits and extends the experiment on the solidarity game by Selten and Ockenfels (1998). We replicate the basic design of the solidarity game and extend it in order to t test the robustness of the ‘fixed total sacrifice’ effect and the applied strategy method. Our results only...

This paper provides a new way to identify conditional cooperationin a real-time version of the standard voluntary contribution mechanism. Ourapproach avoids most drawbacks of the traditional procedures because it relieson endogenous cycle lengths, which are defined by the number of contributors...