We replicate the strategy-method experiment by Fischbacher et al. (Econ. Lett. 71:397-404, 2001) developed to measure attitudes towards cooperation in a one-shot public goods game. We collected data from 160 students at four different universities across urban and rural Russia. Using the classification proposed by Fischbacher et al. (2001) we find that the distribution of types is very similar across the four locations. The share of conditional cooperators in our Russian subject pools is comparable to the one found by Fischbacher et al. in a Swiss subject pool. However, the distribution of the other types differs from the one found in Switzerland.

We replicate three tasks for which Gneezy, List and Wu (Q. J. Econ. 121(4):1283—1309, 2006) document the so-called uncertainty effect: People value a binary lottery over non-monetary outcomes less than other people value the lottery's worse outcome. While the authors implement verbal lottery descriptions, we use a physical lottery format and also provide subjects with complete information about the goods they are to value. We observe for all three pricing tasks that subjects’ willingness to pay for the lottery is significantly higher than other subjects’ willingness to pay for the lottery's worse outcome.

Economic agents often have to make decisions in environments affected by regime switches but expectation formation has hardly been explored in this context. We report about a laboratory experiment whose participants judgmentally forecast three time series subject to regime switches. The participants make forecasts without context knowledge and without support from statistical software. Their forecasts are only based on the previous realizations of the time series. Our interest is the explanation of the average forecasts with a simple model, the bounds & likelihood heuristic. In previous studies it was shown that this model can explain average forecasting behavior very well given stable and stationary time series. We find that the forecasts after a structural break are characterized by a higher variance and less accuracy over several periods. Considering this transition phase in the model, the heuristic performs even slightly better than the Rational Expectations Hypothesis.

We analyze experimentally two sender-receiver games with conflictive preferences. In the first game, the sender can choose to tell the truth, to lie, or to remain silent. The latter strategy is costly. In the second game, the receiver must decide additionally whether or not to costly punish the sender after having observed the history of the game. We investigate the existence of two kinds of social preferences: lying aversion and preference for truth-telling. In the first game, senders tell the truth more often than predicted by the sequential equilibrium analysis, they remain silent frequently, and there exists a positive correlation between the probability of being truthful and the probability of remaining silent. Our main experimental result for the extended game shows that those subjects who punish the sender with a high probability after being deceived are precisely those who send fewer but more truthful messages. Finally, we solve for the Perfect Bayesian Nash Equilibria of a reduced form of the baseline game with two types of senders. The equilibrium predictions obtained suggest that the observed excessive truth-telling in the baseline game can be explained by lying aversion but not by a preference for truth-telling.

We examine choices in two-player extensive-form games that give subjects opportunities for individualistic as well as other-regarding behavior, and where each subject makes choices in a variety of games. Following an extensive search over models, where we estimate a single parameter vector for all the games rather than different parameter vectors for each game, we find that (1) the level-n model organizes the data well, (2) other-regarding behaviors in these games appear to consist primarily of egalitarian and utilitarian behaviors, and (3) there is no significant evidence for reciprocal behavior.

This paper analyzes if men and women are expected to behave differently regarding altruism. Since the dictator game provides the most suitable design for studying altruism and generosity in the lab setting, we use a modified version to study the beliefs involved in the game. Our results are substantial: men and women are expected to behave differently. Moreover, while women believe that women are more generous, men consider that women are as generous as men.

Using a simple one-shot bribery game simulating petty corruption exchanges, we find evidence of a negative externality effect and a framing effect. When the losses suffered by third parties due to a bribe being offered and accepted are high and the game is presented as a petty corruption scenario instead of in abstract terms bribes are less likely to be offered. Higher negative externalities are also associated with less bribe acceptance. However, framing has no effect on bribe acceptance, indicating that the issue of artificiality may be of particular importance in bribery experiments.

Using combined experimental and survey data, this paper provides empirical evidence that firm productivity is related to worker's pro-social behavior in the workplace. At the firm level, we find a strong positive relationship between firm productivity and reciprocating behavior among workers. Investigating workers’ individual behavior we find a similar, strong relationship when regressing earnings, a proxy for productivity, on reciprocity. To address simultaneity we use an instrumental variable approach and find that the initial estimate was upwards biased, presumably because it did not take into account the positive feedback from earnings to reciprocity. The new coefficient remains substantially above zero, but it is statistically insignificant.

We report results from a corruption experiment with Indonesian public servants and Indonesian students. Our results suggest that the Indonesian public servant subjects have a significantly lower tolerance of corruption than the Indonesian students. We find no evidence that this is due to a selection effect. The reasons given by the subjects for their behaviour suggest that the differences in behavior across the subject pools are driven by their different real life experiences. For example, when abstaining from corruption, public servants more often cite the need to reduce the social costs of corruption as a reason for their actions, and when engaging in corruption, they cite low government salaries or a belief that corruption is a necessary evil in the current environment. In contrast, students give more simplistic moral reasons. We conclude by emphasizing that results obtained from different subject pools can complement each other in illuminating different aspects of the same problem.