type="main" xml:id="obes12039-abs-0001" <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>Self-reported life satisfaction is highly heterogeneous across similar countries, a phenomenon that may be explained by the different scales and benchmarks that people use to evaluate themselves. This study uses cross-sectional data gathered from...</p>

We present and experimentally test a theoretical model of majority threshold determination as a function of voters’ risk preferences. The experimental results confirm the theoretical prediction of a positive correlation between the voter's risk aversion and the corresponding preferred majority...

We study the effects of the tax burden on tax evasion both theoretically and experimentally. We develop a theoretical framework of tax evasion decisions that is based on two behavioral assumptions: (1) taxpayers are endowed with reference dependent preferences that are subject to hedonic...

We study individual contributions in a repeated linear public good experiment in which, in each period, subjects are required to contribute a minimum amount and face a certain probability of being audited. Audited subjects who contribute less than the required amount are convicted to pay the...

Questionnaires exploring the relativist vs absolutist perception of wellbeing are administered to 3883 students in eight different countries, four low-income countries (Bolivia, Brazil, Kenya and Laos, 1924 respondents) and four high-income countries (Italy, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK, 1959...

One of the key issues for understanding reciprocity is how agents evaluate the kindness of an action. In this paper we investigate experimentally the hypothesis that the motivation driving an action is relevant for its perceived kindness and, as a consequence, for reciprocal behavior. In...

We experimentally demonstrate how "unpacking" provides a possible approach for mitigating the dilemma of public goods provision through private contributions. Subjects' total contributions increase when a single public good is split into two identical public goods.

This paper presents an experimental investigation of persuasion bias, a form of bounded rationality whereby agents communicating through a social network are unable to account for repetitions in the information they receive. We find that, after repeated communication within a social network,...