This paper investigates the role played by the cultural norms of particularism and universalism for collusive bribery. In our theoretical framework, the act of proposing or demanding a bribe violates a commonly held social norm, thus producing a psychological cost. By lowering this psychological...

This paper provides a direct test of the hypothesis that agents' objective functions are non-separable in economic incentives and social preferences. We study experimentally fixed-prize contests using a 2x2 design, varying orthogonally the degree of competition of the incentive mechanism...

This paper presents an application of the hedonic approach to measure the monetary price of social relations. We use individual-level data for housing and labor markets in 103 Italian cities to estimate the price of relational amenities and construct monetary indexes of quality of relational...

This paper investigates opinion dynamics and social influence in directed communication networks. We study the properties of a generalized boundedly rational model of opinion formation in which individuals aggregate the information they receive by using weights that are a function of their...

Recent studies show that, while losses loom larger than equivalent non-gains, gains loom larger than equivalent non-losses. This finding, at odds with the loss aversion principle, has been interpreted within the framework of regulatory focus theory. In this study, we explore the causal effect of...

This paper presents firm level evidence on the dynamics of nonmanual wage premia and employment shares in Italian manufacturing during the nineties. We find that the relative stability of aggregate wage premia and employment shares hides offsetting disaggregate forces. First, while technical...

This paper investigates the increase in demand for non-manual workers in Italian manufacturing during the 1990s. We find that within-firm skill upgrading is the main determinant of this shift in demand, whereas the reallocation of employment across firms reduces the relative demand for skills....

This paper investigates fund-raising mechanisms based on a prize as a way to overcome free riding in the private provision of public goods, under the assumptions of income heterogeneity and incomplete information about income levels. We compare experimentally the performance of a lottery, an...

This Paper presents firm level evidence on the dynamics of non-manual wage premia and employment shares in Italian manufacturing during the nineties. We find that the relative stability of aggregate wage premia and employment shares hides offsetting disaggregate forces. First, while technical...

This paper describes an empirical study of the implications of agents' heterogeneity for theories of macroeconomic fluctuations based on the role of financial variables. Models of explicit distribution dynamics are applied to company account data from a panel of US manufacturing firms to...