Urs Fischbacher

Universität Konstanz | Uni-Konstanz · Department of Economics

People often have to judge the social motives of others, for example, to distinguish truly prosocial people from those merely trying to appear prosocial. Gaze can reveal the motives underlying social decisions, as decision-makers dedicate more attention to motive-relevant information. We extend the use of eye-tracking and apply it as a communicatio...

Oral contraceptives (OC) and endogenous female sex hormones in naturally cycling women (NC) are related to a wide range of psychological variables (eg, cognition and affect). Little research on social behavior has been done. One study documented a tendency towards more prosocial behavior in OC than NC women, but the underlying neuroendocrine mechan...

We investigate whether risk, time, environmental, and social preferences affect single-family homeowners’ investments in the energy efficiency of their house using established experimental measures and questionnaires. We find that homeowners who report to be more risk taking are more likely to have renovated their house. Pro-environmental and futur...

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 p...

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 exogenous...

Trust between couples is a prerequisite for stable and satisfactory romantic relationships. However, there has been no valid research tool to assess partner-specific trust behavior including costly investments in the trustworthiness of the romantic partner. We here present a comprehensive validation of the newly developed Trust Game for Couples (TG...

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. H...

There is ample evidence that people differ considerably in their preferences. We identify individual heterogeneity in type and strength of social preferences in a series of binary three-person dictator games. Based on this identification, we analyze response times in another series of games to investigate the cognitive processes of distributional p...

Stress is proven to have detrimental effects on physical and mental health. Due to different tasks and study designs, the direct consequences of acute stress have been found to be wide-reaching: while some studies report prosocial effects, others report increases in antisocial behavior, still others report no effect. To control for specific effects...

Stepwise regression to explore relationships between of stress systems and trustworthiness. All parameters of significant models. (PDF)

Stepwise regression to explore relationships between of stress systems and punishment. All parameters of significant models. (PDF)

Course of subjective increases for all VAS. Mean values and standard errors of the mean; solid bars: time of water immersion; shaded bars: decision making; A) stress B) unpleasantness C) tension D) physical symptoms E) pain; WWT = Warm Water Test, SEWWT = Socially Evaluated Warm Water Test, CPT = Cold Pressor Test, SECPT = Socially Evaluated Cold P...

Stastical values of ANCOVA models for behavioral paradigms. All F and p values. (PDF)

Stepwise regression to explore relationships between of stress systems and trust. All parameters of significant models. (PDF)

Stepwise regression to explore relationships between of stress systems and sharing. All parameters of significant models. (PDF)

Stepwise regression to explore relationships between of stress systems and risk. All parameters of significant models. (PDF)

Stastical values of psychological stress response. F an p values of psychological stress response. (PDF)

All payoff structures for the games assessing prosocial behaviors and antisocial and nonsocial risk behaviors. The target participant and that participant’s interaction partner are represented by a red P and black IP, respectively (interaction partners were not in either the stress or control condition). The pairs of numeric values are examples of...

Stastical values of baseline characteristics. F an p values of baseline characteristics. (PDF)

Stastical values of physiological stress response with repeated measures–Within subject results. F and p values of physiological stress response within subjects results. (PDF)

Stastical values of physiological stress response with repeated measures–Between subjects main effects. F and p values of physiological stress response between subjects effects. (PDF)

Stastical values of physiological stress response–maximum increases of cortisol and heart rate. F values, Wilk'sΛ and p values. (PDF)

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 th...

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 contr...

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...

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 behavi...

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 part...

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 exp...

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 proso...

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...

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...

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 he...

Background: Price's social competition hypothesis interprets the depressive state as an unconscious, involuntary losing strategy, which enables individuals to yield and accept defeat in competitive situations. Aims: We investigated whether patients who suffer from major depressive disorder (MDD) would avoid competition more often than either pat...

Decision making in risky situations is frequently required in our everyday lives and has been shown to be influenced by various factors, some of which are independent of the risk context. Based on previous findings and theories about the central role of perceptions of control and their impact on subsequent settings, spillover effects of subjective...

Based on the Appraisal Tendency Framework on the antecedents and consequences of emotions two experimental studies examined the relationship between externally caused loss of control experiences and risk-taking behavior, as well as the assumed mediation of this relationship by the emotion anger. An experimental paradigm for inducing externally caus...

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 observ...

On a daily level, knowledge is shared when one employee asks another for help. The positive effects of helping have been studied, but less is known about how helping can be made more efficient in terms of lowering the costs for the helpers. We investigated how two methods to channel knowledge sharing (bundled help requests and quiet time) affect he...

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 rathe...

A series of studies in experimental philosophy have revealed that people blame others for foreseen negative side effects but do not praise them for foreseen positive ones. In order to challenge this idea, also called the Knobe effect, we develop a laboratory experiment using monetary incentives. In a game-theoretic framework we formalize the two vi...

Interpersonal conflicts are a common element of many social relationships. One possible process in rebuilding social relationships is the act of apologizing. Behavioral studies have shown that apologies promote forgiveness. However, the neural bases of receiving an apology and forgiveness are still unknown. Hence, the aim of the present fMRI study...

Are people blamed for being pivotal if they implement an unpopular outcome in a sequential voting process? We conduct an experimental voting game to analyze how pivotality affects responsibility attribution by parties who can be negatively affected by the voting outcome. We measure responsibility attribution by assigned punishment points and find t...

We investigate what processes may underlie heterogeneity in social preferences. We address this question by examining participants' decisions and associated response times across 12 mini‐ultimatum games. Using a finite mixture model and cross‐validating its classification with a response time analysis, we identified four groups of responders: one g...

Taking the initiative is a crucial element of leadership and an important asset for many jobs. We assess this element of leadership in a game in which it emerges spontaneously since people have a non-obvious possibility to take the initiative. We can show that leadership in this game correlates with real life activities associated with taking the i...

An apology is a strong and cheap device to restore social or economic relationships that have been disturbed. In a laboratory experiment we find that harmdoers use apologies in particular if they fear punishment and when their intentions cannot be easily inferred. After offenses with ambiguous intentionality apologizers are punished less often than...

People often face decisions that pit self-interested behavior aimed at maximizing personal reward against normative behavior such as acting cooperatively, which benefits others. The threat of social sanctions for defying the fairness norm prevents people from behaving overly selfish. Thus, normative behavior is influenced by both seeking rewards an...

Whereas helping is costly for the helper, it is beneficial for the person who requests help. However, there is only scarce evidence on the relative costs and benefits of helping and this evidence is mixed. In addition, hardly any research investigates how these costs and benefits can be manipulated. With a laboratory experiment, we first examined h...

We present experimental evidence on the existence of lies which are disadvantageous to the person lying in individual decision problems. Potential reasons for this behavior are preferences for manipulating others’ perceptions or preserving a positive self-perception. If the utility gained from a certain perception outweighs the monetary payoff gain...

This paper investigates the effect of monetary policy on stock market bubbles and trading behavior in experimental asset markets. For this purpose, we introduce the possibility of investing in interest bearing bonds to the widely used laboratory asset market design of Smith, Suchanek, and Williams (1988). In a series of experiments treatment groups...

The dominant behavior observed in social games such as the ultimatum game, the dictator game, and public good games violates the classical assumption in economics of purely selfish preferences. To account for this behavior, economists have proposed social preference models, which introduce nonselfish motives as additional arguments and parameters i...

Experiments and forest economic questions During the last decades experiments have gained great importance in economics. These experiments deal with questions that are of significance for forest economic research, too. Timber production, for example, is characterised by long-term decisions and, in addition, forestry produces important public goods....

We compare the strategy method and the direct response method in public good experiments in a within-subject design. This comparison is interesting because the strategy method is frequently used to investigate preference heterogeneity. We find that people identified by the strategy method as conditional cooperators also behave as conditional cooper...

Psychosocial stress precipitates a wide spectrum of diseases with major public-health significance. The fight-or-flight response is generally regarded as the prototypic human stress response, both physiologically and behaviorally. Given that having positive social interactions before being exposed to acute stress plays a preeminent role in helping...

In many cases individuals benefit differently from the provision of a public good. We study in a laboratory experiment how heterogeneity in returns and uncertainty affects unconditional and conditional contribution behavior in a linear public goods game. The elicitation of conditional contributions in combination with a within subject design allows...

We study the effects of random assignment to coeducational and single-sex classes on the academic performance of female high school students. Our estimation results show that single-sex schooling improves the performance of female students in mathematics. This positive effect increases if the single-sex class is taught by a male teacher. An accompa...

Contributions to public goods are often unobservable. In order to make contributions visible, voluntary standards are used, which make a particular contribution level publicly observable. This paper investigates the effect of such partial information on the contributions to public goods. First, we observe that the implementation of a too low standa...

To fully understand the motives for delegating a decision right, it is important to study responsibility attributions for outcomes of delegated decisions. We conducted laboratory experiments in which subjects could either choose a fair allocation or an unfair allocation or delegate the choice, and we used a punishment option to elicit responsibilit...

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 hav...

We present experimental evidence on the existence of disadvantageous lies. Literature so far assumes that people do not lie to their monetary disadvantage. However, some people have preferences for appearing honest. If the utility gained from appearing honest outweighs the monetary payoff gained from an advantageous lie or the truth, people will te...

There is well established empirical evidence that more redistribution occurs when luck rather than performance determines the earnings. We provide experimental evidence on how unequal access to performance enhancing education affects demand for redistribution. In this experiment, we can control the information about the role of luck and effort. We...

One lingering puzzle is why voluntary contributions to public goods decline over time in experimental and real-world settings. We show that the decline of cooperation is driven by individual preferences for imperfect conditional cooperation. Many people's desire to contribute less than others, rather than changing beliefs of what others will contri...

-

-

Comprehensive reforms often fail or become piecemeal during preparatory phase of the legislation. A promising candidate to explain the failure of comprehensive reforms is vote trading on a subset of individual bills included in the original comprehensive reform. When legislators expect profitable vote trading on a subset of bills to be possible, th...

We study the implications of reciprocity on agenda setting in a sequential policy decision. We designed a laboratory experiment in which a committee decides sequentially on three independent bills. Selfish committee members would turn down all bills but reCiprocity allows for implicit vote trading. This mechanism gives power to agenda setters. We f...

Taking the initiative is a crucial element of leadership and an important asset for many jobs. We assess leadership in a game in which it emerges spontaneously since people have a non-obvious possibility to take the initiative. Combining this game with small experimental games and questionnaires, we investigate the motives and personality character...

Promises are one of the oldest human-specific psychological mechanisms fostering cooperation and trust. Here, we study the neural underpinnings of promise keeping and promise breaking. Subjects first make a promise decision (promise stage), then they anticipate whether the promise affects the interaction partner's decision (anticipation stage) and...

We study indirect reciprocity and strategic reputation building in an experimental helping game. At any time only half of the subjects can build a reputation. This allows us to study both pure indirect reciprocity that is not contaminated by strategic reputation building and the impact of incentives for strategic reputation building on the helping...

Field evidence suggests that people belonging to the same group often behave similarly, i.e., behavior exhibits social interaction effects. We conduct a laboratory experiment that avoids the identification problem present in the field and allows us to study the behavioral logic of social interaction effects. Our novel design feature is that each su...

Do people blame or praise others for producing negative or positive externalities? The experimental philosopher Knobe conducted a questionnaire study that revealed that people blame others for foreseen negative externalities but do not praise them for foreseen positive ones. We find that the major determinant of the Knobe effect is the relative dis...

Do people blame or praise others for producing negative or positive externalities? The experimental philosopher Knobe conducted a questionnaire study that revealed that people blame others for foreseen negative externalities but do not praise them for foreseen positive ones. We find that the major determinant of the Knobe effect is the relative dis...

Studying social behavior often requires the simultaneous interaction of many subjects. As yet, however, no painless, noninvasive brain stimulation tool existed that allowed the simultaneous affection of brain processes in many interacting subjects. Here we show that transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) can overcome these limits. We apply...

We provide a direct test of the role of social preferences and beliefs in voluntary cooperation and its decline. We elicit individuals’ cooperation preference in one experiment and use them – as well as subjects’ elicited beliefs – to make predictions about contributions to a public good played repeatedly. We find substantial heterogeneity in peopl...

Trust and betrayal of trust are ubiquitous in human societies. Recent behavioral evidence shows that the neuropeptide oxytocin increases trust among humans, thus offering a unique chance of gaining a deeper understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying trust and the adaptation to breach of trust. We examined the neural circuitry of trusting beh...

To fully understand the motives for delegating a decision right, it is important to study responsibility attributions for outcomes of delegated decisions. We conducted laboratory experiments in which subjects could either choose a fair allocation or an unfair allocation or delegate the choice, and we used a punishment option to elicit responsibilit...