We report results from a survey experiment aimed at testing whether providing information on the national public expenditure to the taxpayers and whether involving them in the process of allocating tax revenues over public goods influence the level of the adequate tax rate - the fraction of...

We study contributions and punishment in a linear public goods game, where group members differ in the sources of their endowments. We compare homogenous groups in which subjects are exogenously assigned to the same endowments with heterogeneous groups in which half of the group members invest...

Economic loss to society due to dishonesty can be quite large. Policy makers use several international indices that characterize countries according to the quality of their institutions. However, no effort has been made to study how the honesty of citizens varies across sixteen countries. This...

The paper aims at studying other-regarding preferences of decision makers in the domain of losses. For this purpose the framework of the Dictator Game is adopted, with two research questions under investigation. First, how will the dictator divide the pie with an anonymous recipient, after a...

Traditionally, the virtue of democratic elections has been seen in their role as means of screening and sanctioning shirking public officials. This paper proposes a novel rationale for elections and political campaigns considering that candidates incur psychological costs of lying, in particular...

We present results from an experiment with multiple public goods, where each good produces benefits only if total contributions to it reach a minimum threshold. The experiment allows us to compare contributions in a benchmark treatment with a single public good and in treatments with more public...

We empirically assess the relationship between cultural assimilation and subjective well-being of immigrants by using the German Socio-Economic Panel, a longitudinal dataset including information on both the economic and non economic conditions of the respondents. We find that the more...

type="main" xml:id="obes12039-abs-0001" <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>Self-reported life satisfaction is highly heterogeneous across similar countries, a phenomenon that may be explained by the different scales and benchmarks that people use to evaluate themselves. This study uses cross-sectional data gathered from...</p>

We present and experimentally test a theoretical model of majority threshold determination as a function of voters’ risk preferences. The experimental results confirm the theoretical prediction of a positive correlation between the voter's risk aversion and the corresponding preferred majority...

We present results from an experiment with multiple public goods, where each good produces benefits only if total contributions to it reach a minimum threshold. The experiment allows us to compare contributions in a benchmark treatment with a single public good and in treatments with more public...