This paper studies how organizational design affects moral outcomes. Subjects face the decision to either kill mice for money or to save mice. We compare a Baseline treatment where subjects are fully pivotal to a Diffused-Pivotality treatment where subjects simultaneously choose in groups of...

In this paper, we consider a committee of experts that decides whether to approve or reject a proposed innovation on behalf of society. In addition to a payoff linked to the adequateness of the committee’s decision, each expert receives a disesteem payoff if he/she voted in favor of an...

Group-based identity undermines democracy by impeding democratic change of government. A substantial literature has therefore studied how to make democracy consistent with group identity. We contribute to this literature by introducing the role of group decisiveness into voting incentives and...

This paper derives and justifies a procedurally fair bidding mechanism and reviews experiments that apply the mechanism to public projects provision. In the experiments, not all parties benefit from provision, and the projects' costs can be negative. The experimental results indicate that the...

We study a classic mechanism design problem: How to organize trade between two privately informed parties. We characterize an optimal mechanism under selfish preferences and present experimental evidence that, under such a mechanism, a non-negligible fraction of individuals deviates from the...

Trust games are employed to investigate the effect of heterogeneity in income and race on cooperation in South Africa. The amount of socio-economic information available to the subjects about their counterparts is varied. No significant behavioural differences are observed, when no such...

This paper reports results from a classroom dictator game comparing the effects of three different sets of standard instructions. The results show that seemingly small differences in instructions induce fundamentally different perceptions regarding entitlement. Behavior is affected accordingly,...

We provide experimental evidence on the emergence of redistributive societies. Individuals first vote on redistribution by feet and then learn their productivity and invest. We vary the individuals' information about their productivities at the time when they choose a distribution rule and find...