We investigate the nature of social preferences when a decision maker's information is limited to group members' ordinal rankings. By studying choices made on behalf of others, we identify social choice rules that embody the normative values decision makers implicitly favor. Few people are...

How does the increasing publicness of decisions (due, for example, to social media) affect the total costs of social signaling distortions? While pervasive signaling may induce pervasive distortions, it may also permit people to signal while distorting each choice to a smaller degree....

We investigate how individuals think groups should aggregate members' ordinal preferences - that is, how they interpret "the will of the people." In an experiment, we elicit revealed attitudes toward ordinal preference aggregation and classify subjects according to the rules they apparently...

Why is in-kind aid a prominent feature of welfare systems? We present a lab-in-the-field experiment involving members of the general U.S. population and SNAP recipients. After documenting a widespread desire to limit recipients' choices, we quantify the relative importance of (i) welfarist...

Intra-familial conflict which arises from individual consumption choices in an environment characterized by mutual altruism and direct consumption externalities results in parents receiving from their children less than the desired level of attention. Parents adopt a joint bequest-fertility...

We study experimentally when, why, and how people intervene in others’ choices. Choice Architects (CAs) construct opportunity sets containing bundles of time-indexed payments for Choosers. CAs frequently prevent impatient choices despite opportunities to provide advice, believing Choosers...

We investigate how individuals think groups should aggregate members' ordinal preferences -that is, how they interpret "the will of the people." In an experiment, we elicit revealed attitudes toward ordinal preference aggregation and classify subjects according to the rules they apparently...

Why is in-kind aid a prominent feature of welfare systems? We present a lab-in-the-field experiment involving members of the general U.S. population and SNAP recipients. After documenting a widespread desire to limit recipients' choices, we quantify the relative importance of (i) welfarist...

The voluminous literature on minimum wages offers little consensus on the extent to which a wage floor impacts employment. We argue that the minimum wage will impact employment over time, through changes in growth rather than an immediate drop in relative employment levels. We conduct...

Charity rating agencies often focus on overhead cost ratios in evaluating charities, and donors appear to be sensitive to these measures when deciding where to donate. Yet, there appears to be a tenuous connection between this widely-used metric and a charity’s effectiveness. There is evidence...