In this paper we study whether and how the belief that the gender of politicians affects their competence on different issues influences electoral outcomes depending on the salience of those issues. We first propose a theoretical model of issue-specific gender bias in elections which can...

How do emotions affect policy views on immigration? How do they influence the way people process and respond to factual information? We address these questions using a survey experiment in Italy, which randomly exposes around 7,000 participants to (i) sensational news about immigrant crimes,...

We study theoretically and experimentally decision making under uncertainty in a social environment. We introduce an interdependent preferences model that assumes that the decision maker evaluates monetary outcomes in relation both with his individual and his social reference point. In the...

This paper studies the effects of social comparison on risk taking be- havior. In our framework, decision makers evaluate the consequences of their choices as changes with respect to both their own and their peers' conditions. We test experimentally whether different positions in the social...

This paper models a purely informational mechanism behind the incumbency advantage. In a two-period electoral campaign with two policy issues, a specialized incumbent and an unspecialized, but possibly more competent challenger compete for election by voters who are heterogeneously informed...

This paper models a purely informational mechanism behind the incumbency advantage. In a two-period electoral campaign with two policy issues, a specialized incumbent and an unspecialized, but possibly more competent challenger compete for election by voters who are heterogeneously informed...

We investigate whether a player's guilt aversion is modulated by the co-players' vulnerability. To this goal, we introduce new variations of a three-player Trust game in which we manipulate payoff vulnerability and endowment vulnerability. The former is the traditional vulnerability which arises...

Psychological game theory can contribute to renew the analysis of unethical behavior by providing insights on the nature of the moral costs of dishonesty. We investigate the moral costs of embezzlement in situations where donors need intermediaries to transfer their donations to recipients and...

We propose a bargaining process supergame over the strategies to play in a non-cooperative game. The agreement reached by players at the end of the bargaining process is the strategy profile that they will play in the original non-cooperative game. We analyze the subgame perfect equilibria of...

We compare the performance of liability rules for managing environmental disasters when third parties are harmed and cannot always be compensated. A firm can invest in safety to reduce the likelihood of accidents. The firm's investment is unobservable to authorities. Externality and asymmetric...