Prior work has demonstrated that prosocial incentives – where individuals’ effort benefits a charitable organization – can be more effective than standard incentives, particularly when the stakes are low. Yet, little is known about the effectiveness of prosocial incentives on people’s...

Can algorithms help people detect deception in high-stakes strategic interactions? Participants watching the pre-play communication of contestants in the TV show Golden Balls display a limited ability to predict contestants' behavior, while algorithms do significantly better. We provide...

Individuals frequently transfer commodities without an explicit contract or an implicit enforcement mechanism. We design an experiment to study whether such commodity transfers can be viewed as investments based on trust and reciprocity, or whether they rather resemble presents with...

Experimental studies of risk and time-preference typically focus on one of the two phenomena. The goal of this paper is to investigate the (possible) correlation between subjects' attitude to risk and their time-preference. For this sake we ask 61 subjects to price a simple lottery in 3...

Direct reciprocity means to respond in kind to another person whereas indirect reciprocity is understood here as rewarding someone else. We perform corresponding experiments which use a similar underlying structure as the reciprocity experiment of Berg, Dickhaut, and McCabe (1995). Another...

We present a field study of social learning. The setting is a pair of adjacent fast food restaurants serving very similar cuisine whose main clientele are the students at a nearby major university. We observed whether an uninformed customer's choice of restaurant depends on the relative queue...

The authors use a labor supply; relative pay; experimental economics laboratory experiment to examine the impact of relative wages on labor supply. They test the hypothesis that, ceteris paribus, making a given wage high (low) relative to other wage levels will lead to an increase (decrease) in...

We introduce a simple, easy to implement instrument for jointly eliciting risk and ambiguity attitudes. Using this instrument, we structurally estimate a two-parameter model of preferences. Our findings indicate that ambiguity aversion is significantly overstated when risk neutrality is assumed....

Social norms permeate society across a wide range of issues and are important to understanding how societies function. In this paper we concentrate on 'bad' social norms - those that are inefficient or even damaging to a group. This paper explains how bad social norms evolve and persist; our...

It is estimated that a trillion dollars are annually exchanged in bribes, distorting justice and economic efficiency. In a novel experiment, we investigate the drivers of bribery. Two participants compete for a prize; a referee picks the winner. Participants can bribe the referee. When the...