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Typically, laboratory experiments suffer from homogeneous subject pools and self-selection 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 representative surveys thereby overcoming crucial weaknesses of both approaches. One of the major advantages of our approach is that it allows for the integration of experiments, which require interaction among the participants, with a survey of non-interacting respondents in a smooth and inexpensive way. We illustrate the power of our approach with the analysis of trust and trustworthiness in Germany by combining representative survey data with representative behavioral data from a social dilemma experiment. We identify which survey questions intended to elicit people�s trust correlate well with behaviorally exhibited trust in the experiment. People above the age of 65, highly skilled workers and people living in bigger households exhibit less trusting behavior. Foreign citizens, Catholics and people favoring the Social Democratic Party or the Christian Democratic Party exhibit more trust. People above the age of 65 and those in good health behave more trustworthy or more altruistically, respectively. People below the age of 35, the unemployed and people who say they are in favor of none of the political parties behave less trustworthy or less altruistically, respectively.

Politics is increasingly driven by identity cleavages, which also affect the discussion about inequality and redistribution. Typically, redistribution is meant to reduce inequality, implying that redistribution neither makes the rich richer nor the former poor the new rich. However, if identity affects redistribution, these limits might no longer be binding, and redistribution could further increase existing inequalities (making the rich richer) or reverse the income ordering to favor the once-poor (which can even be inequality increasing if redistribution is strong). In a laboratory experiment, we investigate redistribution via a novel smooth one-dimensional distribution mechanism that also allows for an increase or reversal of inequality. Decision-makers receive information about the recipients' political orientation, nationality, or seat number during the experiment, and we vary the structure and source of income inequality (income is either earned, random, or unfair). We find most choices of the decision-makers involve redistribution, with only 8 % of choices sticking with the status quo. While most redistribution choices reduce inequality, a larger share—(18 %)—increase inequality by making the rich richer, 13 % of choices reduce overall inequality but make the poor the new rich, and 9 % increase inequality by making the poor very rich. Thus, 40 % of decisions are redistributions that are typically unobserved in common redistribution designs. Ingroup favoritism is a strong motive for redistribution in general, and it is the most important motive for redistribution to increase or reverse inequality. Indeed, 85 % of the inequality-increasing or reversing decisions favor the ingroup. Complementary eye-tracking data show that decision-makers’ attention to information about the recipients’ groups and to poor outliers are related to higher levels of redistribution. published

We investigated whether social value orientation (SVO) moderates the effects of intuitive versus reflective information processing on responses to unfair offers. We measured SVO one week prior to an ultimatum game experiment in which participants had to accept or reject a series of 10 ultimatum offers including very low (unfair) ones. Before making these decisions, participants mentally contrasted their individual goals with the obstacle of pondering at length or acting in a hasty way; then they made the plan to adopt an intuitive or a reflective mode of processing (intuitive and reflective condition, respectively), or made no such plans (control condition). Participants with rather high (prosocial) SVO scores were more likely to accept unfair offers in the reflective than the intuitive condition. This effect also evinced for a subset of selfish individuals; however, the majority with rather low (selfish) scores made similar decisions in both conditions. This pattern of results suggests that SVO moderates the effects of intuitive versus reflective modes of processing on responses to low ultimatum offers.

People differ in whether they like to be in control of a decision or whether they would happily delegate a decision. We explore the heterogeneity and the underlying factors of the participants’ values of decision-making power in an allocation choice between a fair and an unfair option. This allocation decision affects the outcomes of the deciding person and three other people in different ways. We find that people differ in their preference for keeping this social decision, and more than 85% never pay for delegating the choice. The value for keeping the decision-making power is affected by the strength, but not the direction of social preferences, and relates to the preference for keeping a useless decision, i.e. selecting the winning number of a lottery. The value of decision-making power is reflected in response times and both eye- and mouse-tracking.

In many countries, the current vaccination rates are stagnating, to the extent that vaccine hesitancy—the delay or refusal to take recommended vaccinations—forms a major obstacle to ending the COVID-19 pandemic. This tendency is particularly concerning when observed among healthcare workers who are opinion leaders on medical matters for their patients and peers. Our study surveys 965 employees of two large Swiss hospitals and profiles vaccine-hesitant hospital employees using not only socio-demographic characteristics, but also a comprehensive set of standard behavioral preference measures: (i) Big-5 personality traits, (ii) risk-, time- and social preferences, and (iii) perceived prevailing social norms. Using multinomial probit models and linear probability models, we find that vaccine-hesitant hospital employees are less patient and less likely to perceive vaccination as the prevailing social norm—in addition to replicating previously published socio-demographic results. Our findings are robust to a range of model specifications, as well as individual and situational covariates. Our study thus offers actionable policy implications for tailoring public-health communications to vaccine-hesitant hospital employees.

Charness and Dufwenberg’s paper is an exemplary one in experimental economics because of its outstanding contributions in motivation, design, and interpretation. First, it addresses the very general question of how communication increases cooperation in a particularly interesting situation – in a trust game with a promise option. Second, the design is clean and has interesting features. It is based on a binary version of the trust game in which promises are easy to interpret, and the collection of higher-order beliefs provides a tight link to the theoretical model. Third, the use of a theoretical model as a basis for the experiment provides an interpretation that can be tested in much detail. Thus, the paper provides useful tools for experimental economics and it is influential because it initiated the investigation of promises and the role of guilt aversion.

Identifying trustworthy partners is an important adaptive challenge for establishing mutually cooperative relationships. Previous studies have demonstrated a marked relationship between a person’s attractiveness and his apparent trustworthiness (beauty premium). Kin selection theory, however, suggests that cues to kinship enhance trustworthiness. Here we directly tested predictions of the beauty premium and kin selection theory by using body odours as cues to trustworthiness. Body odours reportedly portray information about an individuals’ genotype at the human leucocyte antigen system (HLA) and thus olfactory cues in body odours serve as a promising means for kin recognition. Ninety men played trust games in which they divided uneven sums of monetary units between two male trustees represented by their body odour and rated each body odour for pleasantness. Half of the odours came from HLA-similar men (suggesting closer kin) and half from HLA dissimilar men (suggesting non-kin). We found that the amount of money the players transferred was not related to HLA-similarity, but to the pleasantness of the trustee’s body odour. By showing that people with more pleasant body odours are trusted more than people with unpleasant body odour we provide evidence for a “beauty-premium” that overrides any putative effect of kin.

We study how social evaluation affects conformity and anticonformity in theory and in an experiment. In theory, we show that negative social evaluation, i.e., potential punishment, creates incentives for conformity. Positive social evaluation, i.e., potential reward, creates incentives for anticonformity. In a laboratory experiment, we investigate the effect of these incentives in three domains: judgments in the knowledge domain, subjective arts preferences, and decisions in a creativity-related task. We rely on a new design in which we compare choices under social influence with predictions based on choices without social influence using transitivity. The experimental results confirm the theoretical predictions.

We study how reciprocity affects the extent to which a chair can exploit her control over an agenda if a committee votes sequentially on a known series of binary proposals. We show in a parsimonious laboratory experiment that committee members form vote trading coalitions favoring early proposals not only when the sequence of proposals is exogenously given, but also when a chair controls the sequence of proposals. Vote trading occurs even though chairs manipulate the agenda in their favor. Punishment for chairs exploiting agenda control is weak as chairs reciprocate support by others more frequently than nonchairs. (JEL C92, D71, D72)

When people sense that another person tries to control their decisions, some people will act against the control, whereas others will not. This individual tendency to control‐averse behavior can have far‐reaching consequences, such as engagement in illegal activities or noncompliance with medical treatments. Although individual differences in control‐averse behavior have been well documented in behavioral studies, their neurological basis is less well understood. Here, we use a neural trait approach to examine whether individual differences in control‐averse behavior might be linked to stable brain‐based characteristics. To do so, we analyze the association between intrinsic connectivity networks as measured by resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging and control‐averse behavior in an economic exchange game. In this game, subjects make choices that are either free or controlled by another person, with real consequences to both interaction partners. We find that the individual level of control‐averse behavior can be positively predicted by intrinsic connectivity within the salience network, but not the central executive network or the default mode network. Specifically, subjects with a more prominent connectivity hub in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex show greater levels of control‐averse behavior. This finding provides the first evidence that the heterogeneity in control‐averse behavior might originate in systematic differences of the stable functional brain organization.

We investigate the relevance of different distributive fairness norms in a team production process in which the team members’ contributions to the joint output are not necessarily additive. In some of the cases of non-additivity, the individual marginal contributions to the output are not salient. We vary the salience and investigate how third parties allocate the joint output to the team members. We find that the prevalent norm is to hold others responsible only for their inputs rather than for the incremental increase in the output. The marginal productivities are taken into account only when they are made readily apparent.

The disposition effect, i.e., the tendency to sell winning stocks too early and losing stocks too late is one of the most frequently observed and discussed biases of financial investors. We investigate in a laboratory experiment whether the option of automatic selling devices causally reduces investors’ disposition effect. Our investors can actively buy and sell assets, and, in the treatment group, additionally use stop-loss and take-gain options to automatically sell assets. Investors who had access to the automatic selling devices had significantly smaller disposition effects. The reduction was driven by a significant increase in realized losses. The proportion of winners realized was similar in both treatments. Additionally, our setup provides new evidence on which reference prices investors relate to when choosing limits for automatic sales.

Economic theory considers physical production characteristics and related property rights as key determinants of the organization of an industry. Yet, we frequently observe coexisting governance modes within industries and firms, even when the transaction attributes of a commodity are homogenous. We test whether risk and time preferences, price expectations, and trust in supply chain types can explain variations and coexistence in governance. Specifically, we experimentally elicit economic preferences of forest managers in the Swiss wood sector. We find that all behavioral dimensions are related to the choice of sales channel. Most importantly, trust and expectations are key determinants in transferring property rights, while risk aversion, patience, and ownership structure explain the existence of plural forms at the firm level.

Acute stress is known to increase prosocial behavior in men via a “tend-and-befriend” pattern originally proposed as a specifically female stress response alongside the fight-or-flight response. However, the direct effects of acute stress on women’s social behavior have not been investigated. Applying the Trier Social Stress Test for groups (TSST-G), 94 women were confronted with either a stress or control condition. We repeatedly measured their subjective stress responses, salivary cortisol, and heart rate, and investigated their level of trust, trustworthiness, sharing, punishment and non-social risk using social decision paradigms. We detected significant increases in all stress parameters, as well as the wish for closeness during the stress condition. Acute stress exposure elevated prosocial trustworthiness and sharing without affecting non-social risk behavior. These results are in line with findings on the effects of stress in men, and further validate the tend-and-befriend pattern as one possible behavioral response during stress in humans. published

This paper investigates how process data like response time and click position relates to economic decisions. We use a social value orientation experiment, which can be considered as a prototypical multi-attribute decision problem. We find that in the social value orientation task more individualistic subjects have shorter response times than prosocial subjects. Individualistic subjects click more often on their own payoffs than on the others’ payoffs, and they click more often on their own payoffs than prosocial subjects. Moreover, the response time information and the click position information are complementary in explaining subjects’ preferences. These results show that response times and click positions can be used as indicators of people’s preferences.

Inconsistent social behavior is a core psychopathological feature of borderline personality disorder. The goal of the present study was to examine inconsistency in social decision-making using simple economic social experiments. We investigated the decisions of 17 female patients with BPD, 24 patients with major depressive disorder (MDD), and 36 healthy controls in three single shot economic experiments measuring trust, cooperation, and punishment. BPD severity was assessed using the Zanarini Rating Scale for BPD. Investments across identical one-shot trust and punishment games were significantly more inconsistent in BPD patients than in controls. Such inconsistencies were only found in the social risk conditions of the trust and punishment conditions but not in the non-social control conditions. MDD patients did not show such inconsistencies. Furthermore, social support was negatively correlated with inconsistent decision-making in the trust and punishment game, which underscores the clinical relevance of this finding.

Individuals are thought to have their own distinctive body odour which reportedly plays an important role in mate choice. In the present study we investigated individual differences in body odours of women and examined whether some women generally smell more attractive than others or whether odour preferences are a matter of individual taste. We then explored whether levels of reproductive hormones explain women's body odour attractiveness, to test the idea that body odour attractiveness may act as a chemosensory marker of reproductive fitness. Fifty-seven men rated body odours of 28 healthy, naturally cycling women of reproductive age. We collected all odours at peak fertility to control for menstrual cycle effects on body odour attractiveness. Women's salivary oestradiol, progesterone, testosterone and cortisol levels were assessed at the time of odour collection to test whether hormone levels explain body odour attractiveness. We found that the men highly agreed on how attractive they found women's body odours. Interestingly, women's body odour attractiveness was predicted by their oestradiol and progesterone levels: the higher a woman's levels of oestradiol and the lower her levels of progesterone, the more attractive her body odour was rated. In showing that women's body odour attractiveness is explained by levels of female reproductive hormones, but not by levels of cortisol or testosterone, we provide evidence that body odour acts as a valid cue to potential fertility.

z-Tree (Zurich Toolbox for Ready-made Economic Experiments) is a software for developing and conducting economic experiments. The software is stable and allows programming almost any kind of experiments in a short time. In this article, I present the guiding principles behind the software design, its features, and its limitations.

In our recent study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B [1], we investigated the effects of major histocompatibility complex (MHC; or human leucocyte antigen system, HLA in humans) on men's preferences for women's body odours. Using rigorous methods, we found no evidence that men find body odours of HLA-dissimilar women more attractive than odours of HLA-similar women. In his comment, Wedekind [2] claims that our conclusions were premature, because he found (using our data) a stronger negative relationship between pleasantness and intensity for HLA-dissimilar odours than for similar ones. Although this is an interesting finding, it cannot be considered as a support for HLA-related mate preferences. Wedekind's comment is rather misleading, for various reasons. First, empirical evidence for HLA-mediated body odour preferences in humans is not nearly as clear as the author would like to assume. In the 20 years since Wedekind et al .'s seminal work [3], various studies examining HLA-influences on body odour preferences in humans have been published and the reported findings are mixed. In fact, a recent meta-analysis by Winternitz, Abbate [4] revealed that over all studies with human and non-human primates, results on MHC-mediated body odour preferences are inconsistent and non-significant. It is important to note that Wedekind [2] misinterprets the meta-analysis by Winternitz et al . [4]: These authors found preferences for MHC heterozygosity but not for …

Humans vary substantially in their willingness to take risks. In a combined sample of over one million individuals, we conducted genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of general risk tolerance, adventurousness, and risky behaviors in the driving, drinking, smoking, and sexual domains. We identified 611 approximately independent genetic loci associated with at least one of our phenotypes, including 124 with general risk tolerance. We report evidence of substantial shared genetic influences across general risk tolerance and risky behaviors: 72 of the 124 general risk tolerance loci contain a lead SNP for at least one of our other GWAS, and general risk tolerance is moderately to strongly genetically correlated (to 0.50) with a range of risky behaviors. Bioinformatics analyses imply that genes near general-risk-tolerance-associated SNPs are highly expressed in brain tissues and point to a role for glutamatergic and GABAergic neurotransmission. We find no evidence of enrichment for genes previously hypothesized to relate to risk tolerance.

When another person tries to control one's decisions, some people might comply, but many will feel the urge to act against that control. This control aversion can lead to suboptimal decisions and it affects social interactions in many societal domains. To date, however, it has been unclear what drives individual differences in control-averse behavior. Here, we address this issue by measuring brain activity with fMRI while healthy female and male human participants made choices that were either free or controlled by another person, with real consequences to both interaction partners. In addition, we assessed the participants' affects, social cognitions, and motivations via self-reports. Our results indicate that the social cognitions perceived distrust and lack of understanding for the other person play a key role in explaining control aversion at the behavioral level. At the neural level, we find that control-averse behavior can be explained by functional connectivity between the inferior parietal lobule and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, brain regions commonly associated with attention reorientation and cognitive control. Further analyses reveal that the individual strength of functional connectivity complements and partially mediates the self-reported social cognitions in explaining individual differences in control-averse behavior. These findings therefore provide valuable contributions to a more comprehensive model of control aversion.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTControl aversion is a prevalent phenomenon in our society. When someone tries to control their decisions, many people tend to act against the control. This can lead to suboptimal decisions such as noncompliance to medical treatments or disobeying the law. The degree to which individuals engage in control-averse behavior, however, varies significantly. Understanding the proximal mechanisms that underlie individual differences in control-averse behavior has potential policy implications, for example, when designing policies aimed at increasing compliance with vaccination recommendations, and is therefore a highly relevant research goal. Here, we identify a neural mechanism between parietal and prefrontal brain regions that can explain individual differences in control-averse behavior. This mechanism provides novel insights into control aversion beyond what is accessible through self-reports.

Body odours reportedly portray information about an individual's genotype at the major histocompatibility complex (MHC, called human leucocyte antigen, HLA, in humans). While there is strong experimental support for MHC-associated mating behaviour in animals, the situation in humans is more complex. A lot of effort has been spent on testing HLA-associated odour preferences of women. To date, only very few studies have looked at HLA-linked olfactory preferences in men and these studies have revealed inconsistent results. Here, we investigate men's HLA-associated preferences for women's body odours. Importantly, and in contrast to previous studies, these odours were gathered at peak fertility (i.e. just before ovulation) when any HLA-associated odour preferences should be strongest. We scrutinized whether men's preference for women's body odours is influenced by (i) the number of shared HLA alleles between men and women, (ii) HLA heterozygosity, and (iii) the frequency of rare HLA alleles. We found that men could readily differentiate between odours they found attractive and odours they found less attractive, but that these preferences were not associated with HLA. Specifically, men did not prefer odours from women who are HLA dissimilar, HLA heterozygous, or who have rare HLA alleles. Together, these findings suggest that HLA has no effect on men's odour preferences.

Social segregation is a ubiquitous feature of human life. People segregate along the lines of income, religion, ethnicity, language, and other characteristics. This study provides the first experimental examination of decentralized matching with search frictions and institutionalized segregation. The findings indicate that, without a segregation institution, high types over-segregate relative to the equilibrium prediction. We observe segregation attempts even when equilibrium suggests that everyone should accept everyone else. In the presence of a segregation institution, we find that, while the symmetric segregation institution increases matching success rate and efficiency in one environment, it has weak or no effect in a steep-incentive environment. By adding an entry cost to a flat-incentive market, however, the asymmetric segregation institution leads to an increased matching success rate and efficiency in both environments, which underscores the importance of a coordination device.

This paper reports the results of a series of competitive labour market experiments in which subjects have the possibility to reciprocate favours. In the high stake condition subjects earned between two and three times their monthly income during the experiment. In the normal stake condition the stake level was reduced by a factor of ten. We observe that both in the high and the normal stake condition fairness concerns are strong enough to outweigh competitive forces and give rise to non-competitive wages. There is also no evidence that effort behaviour becomes generally more selfish at higher stake levels. Therefore, our results suggest that fairness concerns may play an important role even at relatively high stake levels.

People do not like to delegate the distribution of favors. To explain this reluctance, we disentangle reward motives in an experiment in which an investor can directly transfer money to a trustee or delegate this decision to another investor. Varying the transfer values of the investor and delegate, we find that the trustee's rewards follow a rather simple pattern. In all situations, both investors are rewarded, but the person who ultimately decides gets a higher reward. Unlike studies on the punishment of delegated unkind decisions, our results do not reveal a more sophisticated reward behavior that takes people's responsibility into account. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We investigate the role of affect and deliberation on social preferences. In our laboratory experiment subjects decide on a series of mini Dictator games while they are under varying degrees of cognitive load. The cognitive load is intended to decrease deliberation and therefore enhance the influence of affect on behavior. In each game subjects have two options: they can decide between a fair or an unfair allocation. We find that subjects in a high-load condition are more generous - they more often choose the fair allocation than subjects in a low-load condition. The series of mini Dictator games also allows us to investigate how subjects react to the games' varying levels of advantageous inequality. Low-load subjects react considerably more to the degree of advantageous inequality. Our results therefore underscore the importance of affect for basic altruistic behavior and deliberation in adjusting decisions to a given situation.

We provide experimental evidence on how unequal access to performance enhancing education affects demand for redistribution. People earn money in a real effort experiment and can then decide how to distribute it among themselves and another subjects. We compare situations in which randomly chosen people get access to performance enhancing education with situations in which either only luck or only performance determines outcome. We find that unequal opportunities evoke a preference for redistribution that is comparable to the situation when luck alone determines the allocation. However, people with unequal access to education are more likely to disagree about the appropriate distribution.