We study how the distribution of other-regarding preferences develops with age. Based on a set of allocation choices, we can classify each of 717 subjects, aged 8 to 17 years, as either egalitarian, altruistic, or spiteful. Varying the allocation recipient as either an in-group or an out-group...

Social preferences have been shown to be an important determinant of economic decision making for many adults. We present a large-scale experiment with 883 children and adolescents, aged eight to seventeen years. Participants make decisions in eight simple, one-shot allocation tasks, allowing us...

We study gender differences in the willingness to compete in a large-scale experiment with 1,035 children and teenagers, aged three to eighteen years. Using an easy math task for children older than eight years and a running task for the younger ones we find that boys are much more likely to...

We study risk attitudes, ambiguity attitudes, and time preferences of 661 children and adolescents, aged ten to eighteen years, in an incentivized experiment. We relate experimental choices to field behavior. Experimental measures of impatience are found to be significant predictors of health...

We examine the strategic sophistication of adolescents, aged 10 to 17 years, in experimental normal-form games. Besides making choices, subjects have to state their first- and second-order beliefs. We find that choices are more often a best reply to beliefs if any player has a dominant strategy...

We study with a sample of 1,070 primary school children, aged seven to eleven years, how altruism in a donation experiment is related to children's risk attitudes and intertemporal choices. Examining such a relationship is motivated by theories of reciprocal altruism that provide a cornerstone...

The evidence suggests that relational contracting and legal rules play an important role in credit markets but on the basis of the prevailing field data it is difficult to pin down their causal impact. Here we show experimentally that relational incentives are a powerful causal determinant for...

Well-functioning groups enforce social norms that restrain opportunism, but the social structure of a society may encourage or inhibit norm enforcement. Here we study how the exogenous assignment to different positions in an extreme social hierarchy – the caste system – affects individuals'...

In this paper we conduct a laboratory experiment to test the extent to which Moore and Repullo's subgame perfect implementation mechanism induces truth-telling in practice, both in a setting with perfect information and in a setting where buyers and sellers face a small amount of uncertainty...

The assumption that payoff-relevant information is observable but not verifiable is important for many core results in contract, organizational and institutional economics. However, subgame-perfect implementation (SPI) mechanisms – which are based on off-equilibrium arbitration clauses that...