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...

We study a principal-agent framework in which principals can assign wage-irrelevant goals to agents. We find evidence that, when given the possibility to set wage-irrelevant goals, principals select incentive contracts for which pay is less responsive to agents' performance. Agents' performance...

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...

Social preferences and social influence effects ("peer effects") are well documented, but little is known about how peers shape social preferences. Settings where social preferences matter are often situations where peer effects are likely too. In a gift-exchange experiment with independent...

We investigate experimentally the effect of consultation (unincentivized advice) on choices under risk in an incentivized investment task. We compare consultation to two benchmark treatments: one with isolated individual choices, and a second with group choice after communication. Our benchmark...

A burgeoning literature in economics has started examining the role of social norms in explaining economic behavior. Surprisingly, the vast majority of this literature has studied social norms in asocial decision settings, where individuals are observed to act in isolation from each other. In...

This study investigates the selection into lab experiments among university students based on data from two cohorts of a university's first-year students. The analysis combines two experiments: a classroom experiment in which we elicited measures for risk, time, social preferences, confidence,...

This paper uses a novel experimental design to study the contagion of pro- and antisocial behavior and the role of social proximity among peers. Across systematic variations thereof, we find that anti-social behavior is generally more contagious than pro-social behavior. Surprisingly, we also...

Little is known about the underlying mechanisms of behavioral contagion, in particular with respect to differences in contagion of pro- versus anti-social behavior. Our principal contribution is the use of a novel experimental approach that enables us to analyze the contagion of behavior under...

People contribute more to public goods, the more others give (“crowding-in”). We investigate two possible causes of crowding-in: reciprocity, the usual explanation, and conformism, a neglected alternative. The issue is important since conformism has more scope to bring about endogenous...