Economists are increasingly turning to the experimental method as a means to estimate causal effects. By using randomization to identify key treatment effects, theories previously viewed as untestable are now scrutinized, efficacy of public policies are now more easily verified, and stakeholders...

Recent literature on Adam Smith and other 18th-century Scottish thinkers shows an engaged conversation between the Scots and today's scholars in the sciences that deal with humans—social sciences, humanities, as well as neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. We share with the 18th-century...

Commerce changes the production of wealth in a society as well as its ethics. What is appropriate in a non-commercial society is not necessarily appropriate in a commercial one. Adam Smith criticizes Stoic self-command in commercial societies, rather than embracing it, as is often suggested. He...

Substantial academic interest and public policy debate centers on campaign finance reform. Campaign resources can provide benefits to constituencies if candidates use them to fund the distribution of useful information. On the other hand, voters can potentially be harmed if candidates trade...

Development of human societies requires cooperation among unrelated individuals and obedience to social norms. Although punishment is widely agreed to be potentially useful in fostering cooperation, many recent results in psychology and economics highlight punishments' failures in this regard....

Temptation and self-control in intertemporal choice environments are receiving increasing attention in the theoretical economics literature. Nevertheless, there remains a scarcity of empirical evidence from controlled environments informing behavior under repeated temptations. This is...

We present evidence from a laboratory experiment that individuals who feel having been treated unfairly in the interaction with others are more likely to cheat in a subsequent, unrelated game. We interpret this result as showing that the violation of a social norm (fairness) by others can be...

We study default and endogenous leverage in the laboratory. To this purpose, we develop a general equilibrium model of collateralized borrowing amenable to laboratory implementation and gather experimental data. In the model, leverage is endogenous: agents choose how much to borrow using a risky...

Over the last two decades social preferences have been implicated in a wide variety of key economic behaviors. Here we investigate connections between social preferences and the demand for information about others’ economic decisions and outcomes, which we denote “social curiosity.” Our...

The literature on pro-social behavior shows that older children are more generous than younger children; however, the level of individual generosity is heterogeneous even between children of the same age. This paper investigates whether a child's popularity affects a child's generosity. Our...