Trust pervades human societies. Trust is indispensable in friendship, love, families and organizations, and plays a key role in economic exchange and politics. In the absence of trust among trading partners, market transactions break down. In the absence of trust in a country's institutions and...

Promises are one of the oldest human-specific psychological mechanisms fostering cooperation and trust. Here, we study the neural underpinnings of promise keeping and promise breaking. Subjects first make a promise decision (promise stage), then they anticipate whether the promise affects the...

This paper shows that neglecting fairness concerns and decision errors prevents a satisfactory understanding of how competition affects prices.

A substantial number of people exhibit social preferences, which means they are not solelymotivated by material self-interest but also care positively or negatively for the material payoffs ofrelevant reference agents...

This paper examines the determinants of informal sanctions by a large number of experiments.

Repeated interactions provide a prominent but paradoxical hypothesis for human cooperation in one-shot interactions. Intergroup competitions provide a different hypothesis that is intuitively appealing but heterodox. We show that neither mechanism reliably supports the evolution of cooperation...

In this paper we show that a simple model of fairness preferences explains major experimental regularities of common pool resource (CPR) experiments. The evidence indicates that in standard CPR games without communication and without sanctioning possibilities inefficient excess appropriation is...

Typically, laboratory experiments suffer from homogeneous subject pools and selfselection biases. The usefulness of survey data is limited by measurement error and by the questionability of their behavioral relevance. Here we present a method integrating interactive experiments and...

In this paper, we investigate the effects of competition on bargained outcomes. We show that the neglect of either fairness concerns or decision errors will prevent a satisfactory understanding of how competition affects bargaining. We conducted experiments which demonstrate that introducing a...