Bachelor Student Prize Winner

Eighteen students completed their bachelor's degree in 2020 with a thesis that was labelled ‘excellent’ by their faculty. Here you will find a short introduction to these excellent theses in the form of an "elevator pitch" from each student, plus a video in which the supervisor briefly addresses the lucky winner.

Jule Hodok

 School of Business and Economics | Bachelor Economics and Business Economics

"An Analysis of Cooperative Behaviour in Games"

Jule's elevator pitch 
Economic theory traditionally relies on the assumption that agents are fully rational. Aggregated individual behaviour is explained with human greed at the centre of thought while other social motives are left unconsidered. However, contemporary research reveals a systematic deviation from rational actions. My thesis investigates the emergence of cooperation in games. I used a Competitiveness-Cooperativeness-Index to measure the cooperative temptation in a Prisoners’ dilemma setup and conducted an experiment to examine the predictive power of the Index. My results provide strong evidence against human behaviour that is solely based on pure self-interest as well as empirical support for the theory of the Competitiveness-Cooperativeness-Index.