TY  - RPRT
A1  - Bruttel, Lisa Verena
A1  - Güth, Werner
A1  - Hertwig, Ralph
A1  - Orland, Andreas
T1  - Do people harness deliberate ignorance to avoid envy and its detrimental effects?
T2  - CEPA Discussion Papers
N2  - Envy is an unpleasant emotion. If individuals anticipate that comparing their payoff with the (potentially higher) payoff of others will make them envious, they may want to actively avoid information about other people’s payoffs. Given the opportunity to reduce another person’s payoff, an individual’s envy may trigger behavior that is detrimental to welfare. In this case, if individuals anticipate that they will react in a welfare-reducing way, they may also avoid information about other people’s payoffs from the outset. We investigated these two hypotheses using three experiments. We found that 13% of our potentially envious subjects avoided information when they did not have the opportunity to reduce another participant’s payoff. Psychological scales do not explain this behavior. We also found that voluntarily uninformed subjects did neither deduct less of the payoff nor less frequently than subjects who could not avoid the information.
T3  - CEPA Discussion Papers - 17 
KW  - envy
KW  - emotion regulation
KW  - deliberate ignorance
KW  - punishment
KW  - experiment
Y1  - 2020
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-444463
SN  - 2628-653X
IS  - 17
ER  - 
TY  - GEN
A1  - Heuer, Leonie
A1  - Orland, Andreas
T1  - Cooperation in the Prisoner’s Dilemma
BT  - an experimental comparison between pure and mixed strategies
T2  - Postprints der Universität Potsdam Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Reihe
N2  - Cooperation is — despite not being predicted by game theory — a widely documented aspect of human behaviour in Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) situations. This article presents a comparison between subjects restricted to playing pure strategies and subjects allowed to play mixed strategies in a one-shot symmetric PD laboratory experiment. Subjects interact with 10 other subjects and take their decisions all at once. Because subjects in the mixed-strategy treatment group are allowed to condition their level of cooperation more precisely on their beliefs about their counterparts’ level of cooperation, we predicted the cooperation rate in the mixed-strategy treatment group to be higher than in the pure-strategy control group. The results of our experiment reject our prediction: even after controlling for beliefs about the other subjects’ level of cooperation, we find that cooperation in the mixed-strategy group is lower than in the pure-strategy group. We also find, however, that subjects in the mixedstrategy group condition their cooperative behaviour more closely on their beliefs than in the pure-strategy group. In the mixed-strategy group, most subjects choose intermediate levels of cooperation.
T3  - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Reihe - 107 
KW  - cooperation
KW  - experiment
KW  - human behaviour
KW  - Prisoner's Dilemma
Y1  - 2019
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-435929
SN  - 1867-5808
IS  - 107
ER  -