Institutions are an important means for fostering prosocial behaviors, but in many contexts their scope is limited and they govern only a subset of all socially desirable acts. We use a laboratory experiment to study how the presence and nature of an institution that enforces prosocial behavior...

An empirically founded and widely established driving force in opinion dynamics is homophily i.e. the tendency of "birds of a feather" to "flock together". The closer our opinions are the more likely it is that we will interact and converge. Models using these assumptions are called bounded...

The extensive body of survey-based research correlating between students' cheating and their academic grade point average (GPA) consistently finds a significant negative relationship between cheating and the GPA. The present paper reports the results of a two-round experiment designed to expose...

We look at the effect of transparency on the incidence of costly back-scratching in a laboratory setting by implementing player identification via photographs. In our experimental design players have an incentive to form bilateral alliances in which they favour their partner at the expense of...

The paper studies the relative effectiveness of extrinsic monetary disincentives and intrinsic non-monetary disincentives to corruption. In doing so, we also test the Beckarian prediction that at the same level of expected payoff, a low probability of detection with high penalty is a stronger...

In this paper, we examine labor market favoritism in a unique laboratory experiment design that can shed light on both the private benefits and spillover costs of employer favoritism (or discrimination). Group identity is induced on subjects such that each laboratory "society" consists of eight...

We use an experiment to evaluate the effects of participatory management on firm performance. Participants are randomly assigned roles as managers or workers in firms that generate output via real effort. To identify the causal effect of participation on effort, workers are exogenously assigned...

The ability to punish free-riders can increase the provision of public goods. However, sometimes the benefit of increased public good provision is outweighed by the costs of punishments. One reason a group may punish to the point that net welfare is reduced is that punishment can express anger...

We study the effect on coordination in a minimum-effort game of a leader's gender depending on whether the leader is democratically elected or is randomly-selected. Leaders use non-binding messages to try to convince followers to coordinate on the Pareto-efficient equilibrium. We find that teams...

We study the dynamics of the private provision of a public good that requires both capacity buildup and ongoing operating costs. We show that setting a time limit for the collection of contributions dedicated to capacity buildup minimizes the utility loss at the Nash equilibrium. We test the...