Does transparent leadership promote cooperative groups? We address this issue using a public goods experiment with exogenously selected leaders who are able to send non-binding contribution suggestions to the group. To investigate the effect of transparency in this setting we vary the ease with...

Inequality aversion is a key motive for punishment, with many prominent studies suggesting people use punishment to reduce or eliminate inequality. Punishment in laboratory games, however, is nearly always designed to promote equality (e.g., rejections in standard ultimatum games) and the...

Building on theoretical and empirical literatures showing that choices not only reflect but also create preferences, we develop a two-stage incentivized intervention to promote pro-sociality. In the first stage, participants are incentivized to complete a compound task consisting of a targeted...

Holländer (1990) argued that when non-monetary social approval from peers is sufficiently valuable, it works to promote cooperation. Holländer, however, did not define the characteristics of environments in which high valued approval is likely to occur. This paper provides evidence from a...

In randomized control laboratory experiments, we find that those primed to think about markets exhibit more trusting behavior. We randomly and unconsciously prime experimental participants to think about markets and trade. We then ask them to play a trust game involving an anonymous stranger. We...

We present evidence from a laboratory experiment showing that individuals who believe they were treated unfairly in an interaction with another person are more likely to cheat in a subsequent unrelated game. Specifically, subjects first participated in a dictator game. They then flipped a coin...

The auction design literature makes clear that theoretically equivalent mechanisms can perform very differently in practice. Though of equal importance, much less is known about the empirical performance of theoretically equivalent mechanisms for belief elicitation. This is especially...

We extend the war of attrition by studying a three-period dynamic contest game. In our game, players can fight against their opponents at certain period of the contest and can flee at any time. Waiting is costly. We focus on the role of waiting costs and show that the value of waiting costs is a...

We report data from double-auction experiments in China and the U.S. using groups of exclusively females, exclusively males and mixed gender participants. We find that female groups in China generate price bubbles statistically identical to those produced by exclusively male groups in both China...

The gender composition of teams, and the way it impacts economic outcomes, has attracted increasing attention in the media and the economics literature. Nonetheless, past research has left open the question of how a group's gender composition impacts group performance. In this paper, we propose...