Urs Fischbacher

Biography

Research

• Although a majority of subjects in the public goods game display conditional cooperation, about a third of subjects freeride completely, thus explaining why cooperation in public goods games tends to break down over time.
• The stylized facts observed in ultimatum, dictator, and public goods games as well as in the prisoner's dilemma can be explained by a theory of reciprocity wherein people reward kind actions and punish unkind ones depending on the actions' intentions.
• In ultimatum games, rejection rates for identical offers depend on what other offers are available to the proposer, implying that the utility of an action is affected by the alternatives to that action.
• The inclusion of social preferences, i.e. preferences that also care about the payoffs given to certain other agents, is necessary to understand the effects of competition and material incentives, cooperation and collective action, the optimality of contracts and property rights arrangements, and how social norms and market failures emerge.
• Voluntary cooperation in public goods games is fragile because many people want to contribute less than others, rather than because of changing beliefs regarding others' contributions or differences between people's preferences, and often eventually devolves into universal freeriding.
• Both agents' positive and negative reciprocal behaviour is affected by their beliefs about other agents' intentions to behave fairly.
• In experiments on cheating, 39% of participants were completely honest, while at most 22% lied completely. In some cases, people lied to their disadvantage, which is shown to be motivated by the desire to maintain a positive self-concept, e.g. regarding honesty and a lack of greediness.
• Theories of fairness postulating that players aim to minimize payoff inequalities in cooperation games cannot explain why cooperators keep punishing defectors even in situations where payoff inequalities cannot be reduced, thus suggesting a role for retaliation as a driving force behind informal sanctions.

  Awards and reception

Selected publications

Journal articles