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Social dilemmas are situations in which collective interests are at odds with private interests: pollution, depletion of natural resources, and intergroup conflicts, are at their core social dilemmas. Because of their multidisciplinarity…
This paper studies lying in a novel context. Previous work has focused on situations in which people are either fully aware of the economic consequences of all available actions (e.g., die-under-cup paradigm), or they are uncertain, but…
Situations where people have to decide between hurting themselves or another person are at the core of many individual and global conflicts. Yet little is known about how people behave when facing these situations in the lab. Here we report…
Many experimental studies report that economics students tend to act more selfishly than students of other disciplines, a finding that received widespread public and professional attention. Two main explanations that the existing literature…
We investigate a group choice problem of agents pursuing social status. We assume heterogeneous agents want to signal their private information (ability, income, patience, altruism, etc.) to others, facing tradeoff between "outside status"…
Cooperation on social networks is crucial for understanding human survival and development. Although network structure has been found to significantly influence cooperation, human experiments have observed different cooperation phenomena…
Observation of other people's choices can provide useful information in many circumstances. However, individuals may not utilize this information efficiently, i.e., they may make decision-making errors in social interactions. In this paper,…
Gameplay under various forms of uncertainty has been widely studied. Feldman et al. (2010) studied a particularly low-information setting in which one observes the opponent's actions but no payoffs, not even one's own, and introduced an…
How do incentive levels affect strategic behaviour? We address this with an experiment that separately identifies own- and opponent-incentive effects in two dominance-solvable games that differ in strategic complexity. Higher own incentives…
People increasingly rely on AI-advice when making decisions. At times, such advice can promote selfish behavior. When individuals abide by selfishness-promoting AI advice, how are they perceived and punished? To study this question, we…
Human behavioural patterns exhibit selfish or competitive, as well as selfless or altruistic tendencies, both of which have demonstrable effects on human social and economic activity. In behavioural economics, such effects have…
A selfish learner seeks to maximize their own success, disregarding others. When success is measured as payoff in a game played against another learner, mutual selfishness typically fails to produce the optimal outcome for a pair of…
Across many domains of interaction, both natural and artificial, individuals use past experience to shape future behaviors. The results of such learning processes depend on what individuals wish to maximize. A natural objective is one's own…
In mainstream neoclassical economics, utility maximization is the only engine of individual action, and the other or the social, if it is modeled for decisions deemed fundamental, it is done as a tacit externality parameter affecting an…
Cooperation is fundamental to the evolution of human society. We regularly observe cooperative behaviour in everyday life and in controlled experiments with anonymous people, even though standard economic models predict that they should…
Identifying mechanisms able to sustain costly cooperation among self-interested agents is a central problem across social and biological sciences. One possible solution is peer punishment: when agents have an opportunity to sanction…
It is often difficult to hand-specify what the correct reward function is for a task, so researchers have instead aimed to learn reward functions from human behavior or feedback. The types of behavior interpreted as evidence of the reward…
We add the assumption that players know their opponents' payoff functions and rationality to a model of non-equilibrium learning in signaling games. Agents are born into player roles and play against random opponents every period.…
We show that it can be suboptimal for Bayesian decision-making agents employing social learning to use correct prior probabilities as their initial beliefs. We consider sequential Bayesian binary hypothesis testing where each individual…
We use a controlled laboratory experiment to study the causal impact of income decreases within a time period on redistribution decisions at the end of that period, in an environment where we keep fixed the sum of incomes over the period.…