Subjective payoffs that represent given preferences “all things considered” together withstrictly uncommitted opportunity taking cannot account for the behavior of personal actors. It is shown how agent basedapproaches can explicitly capture internal commitments of persons while sticking to...

Social institutions regulating group conduct have been regarded as necessaryfor human cooperation to transcend family bonds. However, manystudies in economics and biology indicate that reciprocity based on repeatedinteraction suffices to establish cooperation with non-kin. We shedlight on the...

Leadership is important for the well-functioning of organizations. Weexamine the effects of leadership on contributions in public goods experiments.Leadership by example is implemented by letting one groupmember contribute to the public good before followers do. Such leadershipincreases...

In plausible theories of bounded rationality actors are not stimulus-response machines but human beings. As such they are guided by theories that predict the course of the world and prescribe how they should try to intervene in that course. Since boundedly rational human beings cannot only...

If a strict equilibrium is suggested as the solution of a strategicgame in normal form and if some but not all players are committedto their solution strategy, a reduced game results with only thestill non-committed as active players. The reduced game property (orconsistency axiom) demands that...

Systematic experiments with distribution games (for a survey, see Roth, 1995, ) haveshown that participants are strongly motivated by fairness and efficiency considerations.This evidence, however, results mainly from experimental designs asking directly for sharingmonetary rewards. But even when...

The main results of our indirect evolutionary approach to trust in large interactions suggest that trsutworthiness must be detectable if good conduct in trust-relationships is to survive. According to theoretical reasoning there is a niche then for an organization offering a possibly costly...

A robust nding of repeated public goods experiments is that high initialcontribution rates sharply decline towards the end. This paper reports onan exploratory experiment designed to discover whether such a decline is simply triggered by the usual experimental practice of publicly informing...

Two traditional assumptions in neo-classical economics have beenmaterial self-interest and (commonly known) decision rationality. Sincethere is ample contradictory empirical evidence, many recent attemptshave been made to remodel the situation so that rational behavior ismore in line with actual...

Each of several exchange partners is the monopoly owner of a specific commoditywhich she can share with others. It is optimal to keep the own endowment, but allwould gain by mutual gift exchange. Participants play the game repeatedly in constantgroups (partner design) and can establish stable...