We study the impact of cognitive load in dictator games to test two conflicting views of moral behavior. Are social preferences skindeep in the sense that they are the result of humans’ cognitive reasoning while the natural instinct is selfish, or is rather the natural instinct to share fairly...

Empirical evidence suggests that people’s maximum willingness to pay for having a good is often substantially lower than their minimum willingness to accept not having it, and that this discrepancy tends to be especially large when valuing public goods. This paper hypothesizes that differences...

This paper examines the attitude towards relative position or status among rural households in Vietnam. On average, the respondents show weaker preferences for relative position than in comparable studies in Western countries. Possible explanations are the emphasis on the importance of equality...

We find, using survey-experimental methods, that most individuals are concerned with both relative income and relative consumption of particular goods. The degree of concern varies in the expected direction depending on the properties of the good. However, contrary to what has been suggested in...

Empirical as well as experimental evidence strongly suggests that bidders in common value auctions typically do not conform to the requirements of perfect rationality. Eyster and Rabin (2005) develop a theory and an equilibrium concept - x-cursed equilibrium - for bounded rational bidding in...

While many earlier studies have found that people’s maximum willingness to pay for having a good is often substantially lower than their minimum willingness to accept not having it, more recent experimental evidence suggests that this discrepancy vanishes for standard consumption goods when an...

Credence goods markets are characterized by asymmetric information between sellers and consumers that may give rise to inefficiencies, such as under- and overtreatment or market break-down. We study in a large experiment with 936 participants the determinants for efficiency in credence goods...