Standard theory assumes that voters' preferences over actions (voting) are induced by their preferences over electoral outcomes (policies, candidates). But voters may also have non-consequentialist (NC) motivations: they may care about how they vote even if it does not affect the outcome. When...

Democracy is often perceived or justified as a means to realizing voters' preferences. Two major difficulties have received much attention: how to aggregate votes and how to align the interests of representatives with the preferences of voters. This paper identifies a third difficulty which...

We study ingroup bias -- the preferential treatment of members of one's group -- in naturally occurring data, where economically significant allocation decisions are made under a strong non-discriminatory norm. Data come from Israeli small claims courts during 2000-2004, where the assignment of...

This paper develops a framework for incorporating social identity into economic theory. We say that an individual identifies with a group if he cares about the status of that group and wants to resemble its members. Identification is endogenous. People are more likely to identify with a group...

We design an experiment to study the effects of social identity on preferences over redistribution. The experiment highlights the trade-off between social identity concerns and maximization of monetary payoffs. Subjects belonging to two distinct natural groups are randomly assigned gross incomes...