Substantial public policy debate centers on campaign finance reform. Campaign resources can provide benefits to constituencies when used to fund the distribution of information, but voters can be harmed if candidates trade policy favors to special interests in exchange for contributions....

This paper experimentally investigates how donors respond to news about the efficiency of their charities, that is, to a real cost of giving greater than one, and how the response depends on that information being public or not. We find that as long as charities’ efficiency remains...

Altruistic punishment is a fundamental driver for cooperation in human interactions. In this paper, we expand our understanding of this form of costly punishment to help explain a puzzle of voting behavior: why do people who are indifferent between two potential policy outcomes of an election...

Our goal in this chapter is to explain concretely how to implement simulation methods in a very general class of models that are extremely useful in applied work: dynamic discrete choice models where one has available a panel of multinomial choice histories and partially observed payoffs....

From brain imaging data one obtains new economic theory with economically relevant policy implications. In particular, one would like to use data from a small number of subjects in an imaging experiment to predict a larger population’s response to proposed policy changes. This paper develops a...

Convergent evidence for detrimental effects of punishment on cooperation has been obtained in a wide variety of environments, ranging from American students facing punishment in laboratory experiments, to Israeli parents facing fines for arriving late to their child’s day care. We show here...

Research in economics and psychology has established that informal non-monetary sanctions, particularly expressions of negative emotion or disapproval, can enforce fair economic exchange. However, scholars are only beginning to understand the reasons non-monetary sanctions affect economic...

We use a laboratory experiment to investigate the effect that assuming rational expectations has on structural inference in a dynamic discrete choice decision problem. Our experimental design induces preferences up to each subject’s subjective rates of time preference, leaving...

Trust promotes economic growth and development, and previous research has shed much light on reciprocity and other motives for trusting decisions. Why people choose not to trust has received substantially less attention, perhaps in part because not trusting is predicted by standard economic...

People can become less cooperative when threatened with sanctions, and previous research suggests both "intentions" and incentives underlie this effect. We report data from an experiment aimed at determining the relative importance of intentions and incentives in producing non-cooperative...