This study shows that different belief concepts within the same religion can have different effects on distributive behaviour. A dictator game experiment measures the causal effects of the concepts of God and Jesus on both the prosociality of Christians and their propensity to discriminate...

The importance of social identities (e.g. race, gender, political ideology) in economic interactions is well established, but little is known about how people strategically manipulate the visibility or salience of their multiple identity types. This paper experimentally explores a common type of...

Using a laboratory experiment, we study the evolution of economic networks in the context of fragmented social identity. We create societies in which members can initiate and delete links to others, and then earn payoffs from a public goods game played within their network. We manipulate whether...

Building on findings showing that laws exert a causal effect on social norms, this paper investigates whether this "expressive power of law" differs by gender or race. We develop a model to show that such differences are theoretically plausible. We then use an incentivized vignette experiment to...

Policies offering material incentives for Covid-19 vaccination have been widely used around the world as countries pursue the pressing objective of boosting immunity. This paper reports an experiment in China aimed at testing the effects of such interventions on vaccination willingness. We...

It has been proposed that social norms play a role in zero price effects on consumption. In Study 1, we use a norm-elicitation experiment to directly measure the effects on norms of consumption, demonstrating that the social appropriateness of consuming high quantities is significantly lower...

Building on findings showing that laws exert a causal effect on social norms, this paper investigates whether this "expressive power of law" differs by gender or race. We develop a model to show that such differences are theoretically plausible. We then use an incentivized vignette experiment to...

Classic "unravelling" theory holds that buyers should treat with maximal scepticism sellers who withhold verifiable information relating to their quality, as buyers infer from such non-disclosure that the seller possesses the lowest possible quality. This study is the first to use a natural...

Political identity has become the strongest social divide within Western societies. This paper employs experiments to measure discrimination along multiple dimensions of social identity, and replicates previous findings showing the strongest discrimination against out-groups occurs in the...