The indirect evolutionary approach integrates forward-looking evaluation of opportunitiesand adaptation in the light of the past. Subjective motivation determines behavior,but long-run evolutionary success of motivational types depends on objective factors only.This can justify intrinsic...

It has been claimed that people often prefer equity-like considerations and tend to ignore strategic aspects in fair division problems. Here, this is explored by analyzing whether or not such behavioral disposition is evolutionary stable. The answer however is ambiguous: Both, reacting to and...

In diesem Beitrag lassen wir herkömmliche Kritikpunkte an der ökonomischen Neo-Klassik Revue passieren und untersuchen, inwieweit die heutige experimentelle Ökonomik diesen durch gesteigerte Realwissenschaften entgeht. Eine induktive Vorgehensweise, bei der im Labor Ergebnisse unter...

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...

Economists usually treat human behavior as being determined by the shadow of the future, while most other social scientists point to the shadow of the past. This paper considers experimental evidence relevant to the controversy and tries to reconcile both explanations of human behavior with each...

We experimentally investigate whether individuals can reliably detect cooperators in an anonymous decision environment by allowing participants to condition their choices in an asymmetric prisoner's dilemma and a trust game (i) on their partner's donation share to a self-selected charity, and...

In our experiment subjects first answer a personality questionnaire. They then take part in a 3-person game. In the game one player chooses between two possibilities. The first is an outside option which assigns a positive amount to that player, but leaves the two others empty-handed. The second...

In a large scale newspaper experiment 5,132 readers of the German weekly, Die Zeit, participated in a three-person bargaining game. In our data analysis we focus on (1) the influence of age, gender, profession and the medium chosen for participation on bargaining behavior and on (2) the external...

We examine the strategic behavior of leaders and followers in sequential duopoly experimentsin which followers either perfectly observe the leaders’ actions or else observe nothing. Ourexperiments show that consistent with the theory, leaders enjoy a greater first-mover advantagewhen followers...

We report on a research program that employs the indirect evolutionary approach to analyze how the institutional environment drive the evolution of trust and trustworthiness through the evolution of moral preferences, and how in turn the evolution of preferences shapes the evolution of the...