This paper investigates how Confucianism affects individual decision making in Taiwan and in China. We found that Chinese subjects in our experiments became less accepting of Confucian values, such that they became significantly more risk loving, less loss averse, and more impatient after being...

This paper investigates how Confucianism affects individual decision making in Taiwan and in China. We found that Chinese subjects in our experiments became less accepting of Confucian values, such that they became significantly more risk loving, less loss averse, and more impatient after being...

The overuse of medical services including antibiotics is often blamed on Physician Induced Demand. But since this theory is about physician motivations, it is difficult to test. We conduct an audit study in which physician financial incentives, beliefs about what patients want, and desires to...

A recipient of a good deed might repay it to others, instead of to the original donor. We use a lab experiment with naturally-occurring social connections to investigate whether and how the social connection between the donor and the third-party beneficiary spillover to affect the recipient's...

This paper investigates the crowding-out effect of formal insurance on informal risk-sharing arrangements via theory and laboratory experiment. Our model and simulation predict that the crowding out of private transfers is often more than one-for-one and will reduce the total risk coverage....

This paper proposes a model of cabdrivers' labor supply, building on Henry S. Farber's (2005, 2008) empirical analyses and Botond Kőszegi and Matthew Rabin's (2006; henceforth “KR”) theory of reference-dependent preferences. Following KR, our model has targets for hours as well as income,...

We use matched employer-employee data to study the role of the firm in the transmission of income growth into consumption growth. We find that growth in income relative to the firm average (the within-firm component) translates significantly less into consumption than growth in firm average...

Bilateral gift exchange often benefits the gift-giver, but what is the effect of multilateral gift exchange? This study employs a two-giver-one-recipient real task gift exchange game to investigate the effect of gift competition. We show that gift competition hurts givers and benefits...

This paper investigates whether and how the crowding-out effect of formal insurance on informal risk sharing is mitigated by social preference change. We design a lab experiment in which formal insurance is introduced and removed unexpectedly in a repeated risk-sharing game. We find evidence of...