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Lindenberg et al. report experimental evidence for the effect of hedonic shifts on subjects' propensity to engage in moral hypocrisy. Hedonic shifts are changes in individuals' cognitive states that can be triggered by cues in these individuals' environments such as ambient smells. Individuals in a hedonic cognitive state aim at doing what makes them feel good. Hence, the authors hypothesize that (1) individuals who are in a bad mood and are put in a hedonic cognitive state will more often take a moral stance and (2) when asked to act morally refuse to do so, (3) especially when the costs for acting morally are high, and (4) even if the moral issue upon which they are asked to act is unrelated to the issue pertaining to the moral stance they took. The authors test these four hypotheses in two laboratory experiments and conclude that their results support these hypotheses. In this comment, I highlight design, measurement, and data analysis issues arising with the two studies that challenge this conclusion. Throughout my comment, I give some indications as to how a laboratory experiment testing these four hypotheses could be designed and conducted.

The question of how cooperation and social order can evolve from a Hobbesian state of nature of a 'war of all against all' has always been at the core of social scientific inquiry. Social dilemmas are the main analytical paradigm used by social scientists to explain competition, cooperation, and conflict in human groups. The formal analysis of social dilemmas allows for identifying the conditions under which cooperation evolves or unravels. This knowledge informs the design of institutions that promote cooperative behavior. Yet to gain practical relevance in policymaking and institutional design, predictions derived from the analysis of social dilemmas must be put to an empirical test. The collection of articles in this book gives an overview of state-of-the-art research on social dilemmas, institutions, and the evolution of cooperation. It covers theoretical contributions and offers a broad range of examples on how theoretical insights can be empirically verified and applied to cooperation problems in everyday life. By bringing together a group of distinguished scholars, the book fills an important gap in sociological scholarship and addresses some of the most interesting questions of human sociality. Ben Jann(University of Bern); Wojtek Przepiorka(Utrecht University)

Abstract
Reputation systems promote cooperation in large-scale online markets for illegal goods. These so-called cryptomarkets operate on the Dark Web, where legal, social, and moral trust-building mechanisms are difficult to establish. However, for the reputation mechanism to be effective in promoting cooperation, traders have to leave feedback after completed transactions in the form of ratings and short texts. Here we investigate the motivational landscape of the reputation systems of three large cryptomarkets. We employ manual and automatic text mining methods to code 2 million feedback texts for a range of motives for leaving feedback. We find that next to self-regarding motives and reciprocity, moral norms (i.e. unconditional considerations for others' outcomes) drive traders' voluntary supply of information to reputation systems. Our results show how psychological mechanisms interact with organizational features of markets to provide a collective good that promotes mutually beneficial economic exchange.

In today's online markets, the reputation mechanism undergoes its most successful propagation in human history. Online reputation systems substitute informal sanctioning mechanisms at work in close-knit groups and enable complete strangers to trade with each other across large geographic distances. The organizational features of online markets support actors in solving three problems that hamper mutually beneficial market exchange: the value, competition, and cooperation problems. However, due to the plethora of trading opportunities available online, actors face a problem of excess, i.e., the difficulty of choosing a trading partner. Imitation of other actors' choices of trading partners (i.e., herding) can solve the problem of excess but at the same time lead to the neglect of information about these trading partners' trustworthiness. Using a large set of online-auction data (N ≈ 88 k), we investigate whether herding as a strategy for solving the problem of excess undermines the reputation mechanism in solving the cooperation problem. Our analysis shows that although buyers follow others in their decisions of which offers to consider, they do not follow others at any price and refer to sellers' reputations to establish seller trustworthiness. Our results corroborate that reputation systems are viable organizational features that promote mutually beneficial exchanges in anonymous online markets.

People benefit from being perceived as trustworthy. Examples include sellers trying to attract buyers, or candidates in elections trying to attract voters. In a laboratory experiment using exchange games, in which the trustor can choose the trustee, we study whether trustees can signal their trustworthiness by giving to charity. Our results show that donors are indeed perceived as more trustworthy and they are selected significantly more often as interaction partners. As a consequence of this sorting pattern, relative payoffs to donors and non-donors differ substantially with and without partner choice. However, we do not find donors to be significantly more trustworthy than non-donors. Our findings suggest that publicly observable generosity, such as investments in corporate social responsibility or donations to charity during a political campaign, can induce perceptions of trustworthiness and trust.

We exploit the fact that generosity and trustworthiness are highly correlated and the former can thus be a sign of the latter. Subjects decide between a generous and a mean split in a dictator game. Some of them are informed from the start that afterwards they will participate in a trust game and that their choice in the dictator game may matter; others are not informed in advance. In the trust game, before trusters decide whether or not to trust, some trustees can reveal (or conceal) only their true choice in the dictator game, while others can say to trusters, truthfully or otherwise, what they chose. We find that a generous choice made naturally by uninformed trustees and reliably revealed is more effective in persuading trusters to trust than a generous choice that could be strategic or a lie. Moreover, we find that, when they can, mean subjects lie and go on to be untrustworthy.

Most online market exchanges are governed by reputation systems, which allow traders to comment on one another's behavior and attributes with ratings and text messages. These ratings then constitute sellers' reputations that serve as signals of their trustworthiness and competence. The large body of research investigating the effect of reputation on selling performance has produced mixed results, and there is a lack of consensus on whether the reputation effect exists and what it means. After showing how the reputation effect can be derived from a game-theoretic model, we use meta-analysis to synthesize evidence from 107 studies investigating the reputation effect in peer-to-peer online markets. Our results corroborate the existence of the reputation effect across different operationalizations of seller reputation and selling performance. Our results also show the extent to which the reputation effect varies. We discuss potential explanations for the variation in reputation effects that cannot be attributed to sampling error and thereby point out promising avenues for future research.

We argue that individuals use responsibility attribution heuristics that apply to collective decisions made, for example, by families, teams within firms, boards in international organizations, or coalition governments. We conduct laboratory and online experiments to tease out the heuristics subjects use in their responsibility attribution for collective decision makers. The lab experiments comprise a collective dictator game in which decision makers have weighted votes and recipients can punish individual decision makers. Our results show that recipients punish unfair allocations and mainly target the decision maker with proposal power and with the largest vote share. We find weak evidence that decision makers with veto power are targeted or that recipients punish proportional to vote share. The online experiment demonstrates that subjects indeed believe that the decision maker with proposal power has the most influence on the collective decision outcome. We discuss the implications of our findings for theories of vote choice. Adapted from the source document.

The published Stata syntax files (do-files) and data can be used to replicate the results reported in the cited article.

Abstract of the journal article:
In 25 years, research on reputation-based online markets has produced robust evidence on the existence of the so-called reputation effect, i.e. the positive relation between online traders' reputations and these traders' market success in terms of sales and prices. However, there is an ongoing debate on what the size of the reputation effect means. We argue that the rate of truthful feedback that traders leave after completed transactions is negatively related to the size of the reputation effect. The higher the rate of truthful feedback, the quicker will untrustworthy traders be screened and disincentivized to enter the market. With mostly trustworthy traders entering the market, buyers will demand smaller price discounts from market entrants without a good reputation. We test this mechanism empirically in two laboratory experiments. In both experiments, we systematically vary the probability with which information about sellers' behavior in an economic trust game is recorded and shown to future interaction partners of these sellers. In the second experiment, we introduce competition among sellers by allowing buyers to choose one of two sellers in each interaction. We find that sellers give discounts to buyers to build or repair their reputation and that sellers who give discounts or have a good reputation are trusted more. However, we do not find support for our hypothesis that a higher feedback rate significantly decreases sellers' propensity to give discounts. We argue and show in exploratory analyses that this is likely due to the high level of unconditional trust buyers exhibit towards sellers without a reputation. Yet, seller competition increases the propensity to offer discounts among sellers without a reputation the most.

The tension between individual and collective interests and the provision of sanctioning mechanisms have been identified as important building blocks of a theory of norm emergence. Correspondingly, most investigations focus on how social norms emerge through explicit bargaining and social exchange to overcome this tension, and how sanctions enforce norm compliance. However, sanctioning presupposes the existence of the behavior at which it is directed, and the question of how behavior worth sanctioning can emerge tacitly if communication is not possible has hitherto received little attention. Here, we argue that game theory offers an ideal framework for theorizing about emergent behavioral regularities and show how latent norms can emerge from actors' recurring encounters in similar social dilemmas. We conduct two experiments in which small groups of subjects interact repeatedly in a volunteer's dilemma. We vary the heterogeneity of group members in terms of their costs of cooperation and the way they encounter each other in subsequent interactions. Our results show that subjects in homogeneous groups take turns at cooperating, whereas in heterogeneous groups mostly the subjects with the lowest costs cooperate. The emergence of solitary cooperation is moderated by the way subjects encounter each other again and their other-regarding preferences.