For the past two decades, studies measuring social preferences in developing settings have played an important role in building our understanding of economic development and poverty. This book chapter reviews lab-in-the-field experiments that measure social preferences, summarizes categories of...

Institutions may rely on fundamental principles, e.g., of legal philosophy, but may also have evolved according to institutional fitness, as gauged by a society's well-being. In our stylized framework where two fundamental principles, equality and efficiency, conflict with each other, one of the...

We have used the standard trust game on a random sample of university students (N=764) and a random sample of rural residents (N=834) in Malawi. The study identifies social preference types (Bauer, Chytilov'a, & Pertold-Gebicka, 2014; Fehr, Gl¨atzle-R¨utzler, & Sutter, 2013) and how these relate...

Meritocracies aspire to reward hard work and promise not to judge individuals by the circumstances into which they were born. However, circumstances often shape the choice to work hard. I show that people's merit judgments are "shallow" and insensitive to this effect. They hold others...

Parsimony is a desirable feature of economic models but almost all human behaviors are characterized by vast individual variation that appears to defy parsimony. How much parsimony do we need to give up to capture the fundamental aspects of a population's distributional preferences and to...

In markets for credence goods - such as health care or repair services - fraudulent behavior by better informed experts is a common problem. Our model studies how four common features shape experts' provision behavior in credence goods markets: (i) diagnostic uncertainty of experts; (ii)...

Parsimony is a desirable feature of economic models but almost all human behaviors are characterized by vast individual variation that appears to defy parsimony. How much parsimony do we need to give up to capture the fundamental aspects of a population's distributional preferences and to...