We consider a society with informed individuals (adults) and naive individuals (children). Adults are altruistic towards their own children and possess information that allows to better predict the behavior of other adults. Children benefit from adopting behaviors that conform to the social norm...

People often form expectations about others using the lens of their own attitudes (the so-called consensus effect). We study the implications of this for trust and trustworthiness. Trustworthy individuals are more \optimistic" than opportunists and are accordingly less afraid to engage in...

We study Nature's trade-off when endowing people with the cognitive ability to distinguish between different time periods or different prizes. Our key premise is that cognitive ability is a scarce resource, to be deployed only where and when it really matters. We show that this simple insight...

Signaling models of esteem have implications for peer pressure. Using Bénabou's and Tirole's "honor-stigma" model, we analyze how the pressure to engage in costly signaling changes with the distribution of peers' attributes. In particular, we provide novel comparative statics on the effects of...

We use a simple cost-benefit analysis to derive optimal similarity judgments - addressing the question: when should we expect a decision maker to distinguish between different time periods or different prizes? Our key premise is that cognitive resources are costly and are to be deployed only...

One of the most important determinants when it comes to climate change attitudes is political partisanship. While both Democrats and Republicans underestimate the share of their in-groups that believe climate change is happening, this perception gap is wider for Republicans. Using a sample of...

We extend the literature on competitive behaviour by investigating environments in which the choice to compete is not made by an individual themselves, but by someone else. Choosing on behalf of others is an integral part of life and gender may be an important factor in shaping the perceived...

We study the effects of an intervention aimed at identifying and containing outbreaks in a network model of contagion where social distance is endogenous. The intervention induces a fall in the risk of infection, to which agents optimally respond by reducing social distance. If the intervention...

We document a sharp increase in hate crime in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. We show that this rise was more pronounced in more pro-remain areas. These facts are consistent with a model in which individual behavior is dictated by a desire to conform to imperfectly observable social...

This paper focuses on belief distortion in the context of lying decisions. We employ a twostage variant of the "dice under the cup" paradigm, in which subjects' beliefs are elicited in stage 1 before performing the dice task in stage 2. In stage 1, we elicit the subjects' beliefs about (i)...