We conduct a large-scale survey experiment in nine European countries to study how priming a major crisis (COVID-19), common economic interests, and a shared identity influences altruism, reciprocity and trust of EU citizens. We find that priming the COVID-19 pandemic increases altruism and...

This paper presents a model of private provision of a public good where individuals in a group have altruistic preferences and care about the private and public good consumption of the other members of the group. I show that increasing the level of altruism increases the Nash level of the public...

In alternating-offer bargaining, a seller is "stubborn" if she demands the same asking price more than once. We provide empirical evidence on stubbornness and inform the theoretical literature by analyzing millions of eBay bargaining threads taken from Backus et al. (2020). Focusing on the best...

Multi-battle team contests are ubiquitous in real-life competitions. All temporal structures of multi-battle team contests yield the same total effort, as demonstrated by Fu, Lu, and Pan (2015, American Economic Review, 105(7): 2120-40)'s remarkable temporal-structure independence. Rather than...

This paper studies the consequences of productivity shocks on conflict behavior in the presence of loss aversion. In a first step, I incorporate expectation based loss preferences à la Köszegi and Rabin (2006, 2007) into a Hirshleifer-Skaperdas conflict game and show that negative productivity...

Participants in an innovation contest may steal their opponents’ ideas to enhance their chance of winning. To model this, I introduce the ability to copy another player’s effort in a Tullock contest between two players. I characterise the unique equilibrium in this game dependent on the...

I analyse a group contest in which groups decide over two dimensions of membership-exclusivity: whether a member is allowed to join the group at all, and whether this member is allowed to join another group as well. If the prize is mostly private, group leaders do not offer membership in...

This paper investigates whether the COVID-19 crisis has affected the way we vote and think about politics, as well as our broader attitudes and underlying value systems. We fielded large online survey experiments in Italy, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands, well into the first wave of the...

We examine whether collective memories on the aid&reform programs chosen to handle the 2010 European debt crisis differ between citizens from borrower and lender countries. We use new international survey data for non-experts and experts in member countries of the euro area. The results show...

Social trust is a crucial ingredient for successful collective action. What causes social trust to develop, however, remains poorly understood. The quality of political institutions has been proposed as a candidate driver and has been shown to correlate with social trust. We show that this...