Acts of dishonesty permeate life. Understanding their origins, and what mechanisms help to attenuate such acts is an underexplored area of research. This study takes an economics approach to explore the propensity of individuals to act dishonestly across different contexts. We conduct an...

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...

Recently a credibility crisis has taken hold across the social sciences, arguing that a component of Fischer (1935)’s tripod has not been fully embraced: replication. The importance of replications is not debatable scientifically, but researchers’ incentives are not sufficient to encourage...

Substantial research with adult populations has found that selfish impulses are less likely to be pursued when decisions are publicly observable. To the best of our knowledge, however, this behavioral regularity has not been systematically explored as potential solution to social dilemmas. This...

The literature on pro-social behavior shows that older children are more generous than younger children; however, the level of individual generosity is heterogeneous even between children of the same age. This paper investigates whether a child’s popularity affects a child’s generosity. Our...

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...

Social preferences have been implicated in many important economic behaviors. Building on Fehr and Schmidt (1999), we here investigate connections between social preferences and the demand for information about others' economic decisions and outcomes, which we denote “social curiosity.”...

This is the first paper to test the asset pricing implication of leverage in a laboratory. We show that as theory predicts, leverage increases asset prices: when an asset can be used as collateral (i.e., when the asset can be bought on margin), its price goes up. This increase is significant,...

Previous research indicates that cheap-talk promises promote cooperation. We extend the empirical study of promises to a three person environment. Doing this enabled us to study two features of promises in the naturally occurring world that have not been studied in the previous literature. For...

Research has shown that natural language communication is more effective than intention-signaling in promoting coordination. Our paper studies the reasons behind this finding. We hypothesize that, when communicating with natural language, people use and respond to both intentions and attitudes,...