Group liability is often portrayed as the key innovation that led to the explosion of the microcredit movement, which started with the Grameen Bank in the 1970s and continues on today with hundreds of institutions around the world. Group lending claims to improve repayment rates and lower...

We study the effect of social information on the voluntary provision of public goods. Competing theories predict that others[1] contributions might be either substitutes or complements to one's own. We demonstrate a positive social information effect on individual contributions, supporting...

This paper examines the accuracy of beliefs about corruption, using data from Indonesian villages. Specifically, I compare villagers' stated beliefs about the likelihood of corruption in a road-building project in their village with a more objective measure of 'missing expenditures' in the...

Most academic and development policy discussions about microentrepreneurs focus on credit constraints and assume that subject to those constraints, the entrepreneurs manage their business optimally. Yet the self-employed poor rarely have any formal training in business skills. A growing number...

One conjecture in the theory of incentives is that incentives based on broader outcomes may be better at motivating agents than incentives based on narrow measures. We designed an experiment to test these hypotheses using a "prospective randomized evaluation procedure" (PREP). We then apply PREP...

Critics of stated preference methods argue that hypothetical bias precludes survey techniques from providing reliable economic values for non-market goods and services, rendering estimation of the total economic benefits of public programs fruitless. This paper explores a relatively new...

Framing a decision situation differently has affected behavior substantially in previous studies. This paper tests a framing effect in a field experiment at the University of Zurich. Each semester, every student has to decide whether to contribute to two social funds. Students were randomly...

We document the establishment and evolution of a cooperative norm among workers using evidence from a natural field experiment on a leading UK farm. Workers are paid according to a relative incentive scheme under which increasing individual effort raises a worker's own pay but imposes a negative...

This paper examines the impact of social comparisons on fundraising and charitable contributions. We present results from a field experiment involving contribution to a public radio station. Some callers are told of the contributions decisions of others, and other callers are given no such...

Numerous laboratory studies find that minor nuances of presentation and description change behavior in ways that are inconsistent with standard economic models. How much do these context effect matter in natural settings, when consumers make large, real decisions and have the opportunity to...