Moral hazards are said to occur when one party makes decisions that have potential negative consequences that will either be fully or partially experienced by another party. The present experiment sought to explore moral hazard in a laboratory setting. Participants made choices between certain...

Actual behaviour is influenced in important ways by moral emotions, for instance guilt or shame. The framework of dynamic psychological games allows the economic modelling of such emotions. Our experimental study uses psychological scales to measure individuals’ dispositions to experience...

Should one use words or money to foster trust of the other party if no means of enforcing trustworthiness are available? This paper reports an experiment studying the effectiveness of two types of mechanisms for promoting trust: a costly gift and a costless message as well as their mutual...

This paper uses a controlled laboratory environment and a two-person investment game in a multi-period setting to examine the impact of empowering investors with the right to veto the investee’s profit distribution on trust and trustworthiness. Two forms of vetoes are tested: the first is...

Knowing when to trust is an essential skill, but little is known about its cognitive development. No previous studies have examined the development of trust while controlling for age differences in altruism. We hypothesized that older children are more likely to trust, and that this age-related...

This paper proposes and evaluates the tax affinity hypothesis claiming that individuals derive non-negligible utility from paying taxes due to their pro-social tendencies. We present a model in the neoclassical labor–leisure framework with tax paid as a third argument of the utility function....

Reciprocity is common in economic and social domains, and it has been widely documented in the laboratory. While positive and negative reciprocity are observed in investment and ultimatum games, respectively, prior laboratory studies often neglect the effect of time delays that are common in...

We argue that trust can be incentivised by measures which increase the ability of trusters to protect themselves against risk. We work within the framework originally established by Berg, Dickhaut, and McCabe (1995) in which trust is measured experimentally as the ability to generate reciprocity...

The existing literature acknowledges that a mismatch between the experimenter’s and the subjects’ models of an experimental task can adversely affect the interpretation of data from laboratory experiments. We primarily focus on experiments designed to test a hypothesis by comparing behavior...

In this paper, both a conjoint analysis and a lab experiment are conducted to analyze the influence of changes in the tax rate and the tax base on the perceived tax burden. Our results show that the majority of individuals do not make rational tax decisions based on the actual tax burden but...