Parsimony is a desirable feature of economic models but almost all human behaviors are characterized by vast individual variation that appears to defy parsimony. How much parsimony do we need to give up to capture the fundamental aspects of a population's distributional preferences and to...

For the past two decades, studies measuring social preferences in developing settings have played an important role in building our understanding of economic development and poverty. This book chapter reviews lab-in-the-field experiments that measure social preferences, summarizes categories of...

What matters for individuals' preferences for redistribution? In this paper we show that consequentialist beliefs about inequality - beliefs about how economic inequality changes the crime rate or the quality of democratic institutions, for example - have a large causal impact on individuals'...

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...

Contrary to the traditional economic view that individuals misreport private information to maximize material payoffs, recent evidence highlights robust preferences for truth-telling among many decision-makers. Theoretical models that align with aggregate behavioral patterns posit that these...

This study investigates the relationship between economic preferences and COVID-19 vaccination readiness using two representative samples of the German population (N 5,000). We elicited altruism, patience, risk-taking and trust using validated survey questions. We find robust, positive...

Inspired by empirical evidence from the oil market, we build a model of an oligopoly facing a fringe as well as competition from renewable resources. We explore different subclasses of HARA utility functions (Cobb-Douglas, power and quadratic utility) to check the robustness of results found in...

Recent research is exploring the case for choice-induced changes in preferences using the free-choice paradigm of Brehm (1956). Participants are faced with a choice between items that they have given the same rating of liking, two items at a time, and it is found that an item not chosen in one...