Related papers: Doing good vs. avoiding bad in prosocial choice: A…
A stylized experiment, the public goods game, has taught us the peculiar reproducible fact that humans tend to contribute more to shared resources than expected from economically rational assumptions. There have been two competing…
Cooperation in one-shot anonymous interactions is a widely documented aspect of human behaviour. Here we shed light on the motivations behind this behaviour by experimentally exploring cooperation in a one-shot continuous-strategy…
A growing body of work suggests that people are sensitive to moral framing in economic games involving prosociality, suggesting that people hold moral preferences for doing the "right thing". What gives rise to these preferences? Here, we…
Rejections of positive offers in the Ultimatum Game have been attributed to different motivations. We show that a model combining social preferences and moral concerns provides a unifying explanation for these rejections while accounting…
What is intuitive: pro-social or anti-social behaviour? To answer this fundamental question, recent studies analyse decision times in game theory experiments under the assumption that intuitive decisions are fast and that deliberation is…
This study proposes a tractable stochastic choice model to identify motivations for prosocial behavior, and to explore alternative motivations of deliberate randomization beyond ex-ante fairness concerns. To represent social preferences, we…
Recent work highlights that cooperation in the one-shot Prisoner's dilemma (PD) is primarily driven by moral preferences for doing the right thing, rather than social preferences for equity or efficiency. By contrast, little is known on…
Costly punishment has been suggested as a key mechanism for stabilizing cooperation in one-shot games. However, recent studies have revealed that the effectiveness of costly punishment can be diminished by second-order free riders (i.e.,…
Understanding whether preferences are sensitive to the frame has been a major topic of debate in the last decades. For example, several works have explored whether the dictator game in the give frame gives rise to a different rate of…
Human cooperation depends on how accurately we infer others' motives--how much they value fairness, generosity, or self-interest from the choices they make. We model that process in binary dictator games, which isolate moral trade-offs…
One-shot anonymous unselfishness in economic games is commonly explained by social preferences, which assume that people care about the monetary payoffs of others. However, during the last ten years, research has shown that different types…
In the Ultimatum Game (UG) one player, named "proposer", has to decide how to allocate a certain amount of money between herself and a "responder". If the offer is greater than or equal to the responder's minimum acceptable offer (MAO),…
Recently, reputation-based indirect reciprocity has been widely applied to the study on fairness behavior. Previous works mainly investigate indirect reciprocity by considering compulsory participation. While in reality, individuals may…
As Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents increasingly engage with human society, how well do we understand their prosocial behaviors? We (1) investigate how LLM agents' prosocial behaviors can be induced by different personas and…
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…
The conflict between pro-self and pro-social behaviour is at the core of many key problems of our time, as, for example, the reduction of air pollution and the redistribution of scarce resources. For the well-being of our societies, it is…
Behavioral experiments on the Ultimatum Game have shown that we human beings have remarkable preference in fair play, contradicting the predictions by the game theory. Most of the existing models seeking for explanations, however, strictly…
Promoting cooperation is an intellectual challenge in the social sciences, for which the iterated Prisoners' Dilemma (IPD) is a fundamental framework. The traditional view that there exists no simple ultimatum strategy whereby one player…
Strong reciprocity is a fundamental human characteristic associated with our extraordinary sociality and cooperation. Laboratory experiments on social dilemma games and many field studies have quantified well-defined levels of cooperation…
The iterated prisoner's dilemma is a game that produces many counter-intuitive and complex behaviors in a social environment, based on very simple basic rules. It illustrates that cooperation can be a good thing even in a competitive world,…