We investigate the link between leadership, beliefs and pro-social behavior. This link is interesting because field evidence suggests that people's behavior in domains like charitable giving, tax evasion, corporate culture and corruption is influenced by leaders (CEOs, politicians) and beliefs...

We introduce the word illustration task (WIT), a novel experimental task to quantify performance in an idea generation context. Between treatments, we vary whether or not piece-rate (PR) incentives are implemented and the degree to which these incentives are aligned with the desirable outcome....

Governments often choose deficit financing over budget cuts or tax increases to fund public goods, driven by the political unpopularity of the latter options. This study investigates the potential trade-off between maintaining prudent public finances and securing voter support by analyzing the...

Concern about potential free riding in the provision of public goods has a long history. More recently, experimental economists have turned their attention to the conditions under which free riding would be expected to occur. A model of free riding is provided here which demonstrates that...

In the last thirty years, economists and other social scientists have investigated people's normative views on distributive justice. Here we study people's normative views in social dilemmas, which underlie many situations of economic and social significance. Using insights from moral philosophy...

Policies and explicit private incentives designed for self-regarding individuals sometimes are less effective or even counterproductive when they diminish altruism, ethical norms and other social preferences. Evidence from 51 experimental studies indicates that this crowding out effect is...

This paper brings an important empirical contribution to the academic literature by examining whether gender differences in tax compliance are due to higher prosociality among women. We conducted a large cross-national tax compliance experiment carried out in Italy, U.K., U.S., Sweden, and...

We report experimental findings on the role of charitable promises in bargaining settings. We vary the enforceability of such promises within variants of ultimatum games where the proposer suggest a split between himself, the responder and a char-itable donation. By reneging on initial pledges,...

Defense spending accounts for a large share of the budget in many countries, but the value of the resulting public good - national defense - has so far escaped assessment. Much of the literature has instead considered indirect benefits of defense spending in terms of greater economic growth or...

We explore network effects on generosity for different network dimensions. To this end we elicit multiple network dimensions (friendship, social support, economic exchange, etc.) in a rural village in the Southern hemisphere and measure generosity with a sequence of dictator games conducted in...