Given the success of the 1st Summer School on Psychological Game Theory (as indicated by attendants’ written reports), the 2nd edition of the Summer School builds on the same structure as for the last year, with students being introduced to fundamental results in psychological game theory and specific models of preferences (e.g., guilt aversion, reciprocity). Pierpaolo Battigalli and Martin Dufwenberg will provide lectures, and Alec Smith (Virginia Tech) will provide group exercise classes on how to model belief-dependent emotions through psychological games.

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For this 2nd edition of the summer school, additional courses will be available, aimed at letting students familiarize with cognitive measurements, experimental tests and applications of belief-dependent preferences: Giuseppe Attanasi will organize classroom experiments meant to help students learn how to design experimental tests of models with belief-dependent preferences, for specific feelings and in specific situations of strategic interactions (e.g., dictator game, trust game, and ultimatum game).

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Furthermore, one of the special speaker of the workshop, Werner Güth, will give a SABE special lecture at the summer school: “Belief-dependent motivations in the ultimatum game.” The ultimatum game, introduced by Güth et al. (JEBO 1982), has shaped our understanding of social behavior in interactive strategic situations (see van Damme et al., JEBO 2014). In particular, "the ultimatum game has been an important workhorse for the empirical analysis of non-consequential forms of other-regarding preferences, and in particular reciprocity” (see section 6, pp. 303-305, by Dufwenberg & Kirchsteiger, in van Damme et al., JEBO 2014). Werner Güth’s lecture will be aimed at showing how belief-dependent motivations of the proposer (e.g., guilt) and of the responder (e.g., reciprocity) can be theoretically modeled and experimentally elicited in the ultimatum game.

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Finally, two special speakers of the workshop, internationally well-known neuro-economists and decision neuro-scientists, will also give a lecture on the economic importance of specific emotions, stressing those psychological and cognitive features that might shape strategic interaction among “emotional” players. More precisely, Giorgio Coricelli (University of Southern California) and Christian Ruff (University of Zurich) will introduce students to cognitive measures aimed at understanding the neural mechanisms that mediate behavior in social dilemmas: there is at present limited understanding of how complex social emotions such as guilt and reciprocity are instantiated in the brain (see, e.g., Chang et al., Neuron 2011). These two IAREP special lectures should strengthen the link between psychology and economics that has characterized the previous edition of the summer school.