We introduce a novel concept, group image concerns, showing that individuals change their behavior and are willing to incur personal costs to cultivate a positive image of their groups. We develop an experimental method to identify and quantify group image concerns, and conduct a series of...

Can elections change people's ideas about what is ethically right and what is wrong? A number of recent observations suggest that social norms can change rapidly as a result of election outcomes. We explore this conjecture using a controlled online experiment. In our experiment, participants...

Allegations of voter fraud accompany many real-world elections. How does electoral malpractice affect the acceptance of elected institutions? Using an online experiment in which people distribute income according to majority-elected rules, we show that those who experience vote buying or voter...

We investigate fairness preferences in matching mechanisms using a spectator design. Participants choose between the Boston mechanism or the serial dictatorship mechanism (SD) played by others. In our setup, the Boston mechanism generates justified envy, while the strategy-proof SD ensures...

We investigate fairness preferences in matching mechanisms using a spectator design. Participants choose between the Boston mechanism or the serial dictatorship mechanism (SD) played by others. In our setup, the Boston mechanism generates justified envy, while the strategy-proof SD ensures...

With the help of a simple model, we show that the hindsight bias can lead to inefficient delegation decisions. This prediction is tested experimentally. In an online experiment that was conducted during the FIFA World Cup 2010 participants were asked to predict a number of outcomes of the...

We analyze the two goals behind the European Bologna Process of increasing student mobility: enabling graduates to develop multi-cultural skills and increasing the quality of universities. We isolate three effects: 1) a competition effect that raises quality; 2) a free rider effect that lowers...

In this paper, I offer a theoretical explanation of the robust gender differences in educational achievement distributions of school children. I consider a shot cheap talk game with two different types of senders (biased teachers and fair teachers), two types of receivers (normal and special...

We perform an experiment where subjects pay for the right to participate in a shareholder vote. We find that experimental subjects are willing to pay a significant premium for the voting right even though there should be no such premium in our setup under full rationality. Private benefits from...

We develop a dynamic model of political competition. Each party has a policymotivated ideological wing and an office-motivated opportunistic wing. A blockade arises if inner-party conflict stops policy implementation. We use this model to study whether early elections should be used to overcome...