Altruistic punishment is a fundamental driver for cooperation in human interactions. In this paper, we expand our understanding of this form of costly punishment to help explain a puzzle of voting behavior: why do people who are indifferent between two potential policy outcomes of an election...

This paper experimentally investigates how donors respond to news about the efficiency of their charities, that is, to a real cost of giving greater than one, and how the response depends on that information being public or not. We find that as long as charities’ efficiency remains...

Recent research suggests that while there are negative effects of betrayal aversion, that the presence of betrayal-averse agents is beneficial in reducing trusteesÕ willingness to betray trust. If true, then many common knowledge institutions may have adopted institutional rules and features...

A continuing goal of experiments is to understand risky decisions when the decisions are important. Often a decision’s importance is related to the magnitude of the associated monetary stake. Khaneman and Tversky (1979) argue that risky decisions in high stakes environments can be informed...

Recent research suggests that while betrayal aversion may have negative effects, the presence of betrayal-averse agents is beneficial in reducing trustees’ willingness to betray trust. In light of this, many common knowledge institutions may have adopted rules and features which mitigate the...

Sacrifice is widely believed to enhance cooperation in churches, communes, gangs, clans, military units, and many other groups. We find that sacrifice can also work in the lab, apart from special ideologies, identities, or interactions. Our subjects play a modified VCM game--one in which they...

Kahneman and Tversky (1979) argued that risky decisions in high stakes environments can be informed using questionnaires with hypothetical choices. Yet results by Holt and Laury (2002) suggest that questionnaire responses and decisions in hypothetical and low monetary payoff environments do not...

Do politicians tend to follow a strategy of ambiguity in their policy positions or a strategy of reputational development to reduce uncertainty about where they stand? Ambiguity could allow a legislator to avoid alienating constituents and to play rival interests off against each other to...

This paper develops a positive theory of how competition among political pressure groups shapes the organization of Congress and empirically investigates how such competition in financial services affects the distribution of political action committee (PAC) contributions to legislators.