We study how donors decide which charity to give to. To this end, we construct a theoretical model that clarifies the conditions in which the stand-alone benefit from giving, price of giving, and cost of information acquisition inform giving decisions. The model shows that giving decisions are...

Policy-makers world-wide have proposed a new contract – the “social impact bond” (SIB) – which they claim can allay the underperformance and underfunding afflicting not-for-profit sectors, by tying the private returns of (social) investors to the success of social programs (Bolton 2010;...

Faced with an ageing population, governments are shifting the financial responsibility for retirement to their citizens. Employers, too, are shifting this responsibility to employees, with most now offering defined-contribution retirement plans. Yet it is widely acknowledged that consumers do...

Analyzing the rhetorical structure of The Wealth of Nations (Smith WN) and its context, we make the case for the central importance of its Book V, "Of the Revenue of the Sovereign or Commonwealth”, which tends to be neglected in most accounts of Smith’s oeuvre (even, most recently, in the...

Analyzing the rhetorical structure of The Wealth of Nations (Smith WN) and its context, we make the case for the central importance of its Book V, "Of the Revenue of the Sovereign or Commonwealth”, which tends to be neglected in most accounts of Smith’s oeuvre (even, most recently,...

To discuss experimental results without discussing how they came about makes sense when the results are robust to the way experiments are conducted. Experimental results, however, are – arguably more often than not – sensitive to numerous design and implementation characteristics such as the...

In this paper, we reproduce Engel’s (2011) meta-study of dictator game experiments using his data, and then replicate it using our own data. We find that Engel’s (2011) meta-study of dictator game experiments is quite robust. We show that meta-analyses of dictator game experiments depend to...

We try to better understand the comparative advantages of structural and behavioral remedies of deregulation in electricity markets, an eminent policy issue for which the experimental evidence is scant and problematic. Specifically, we investigate theoretically and experimentally the effects on...

The literature on dictator [D] games seems to demonstrate that some people are quite altruistic (nice), whereas the literature on joy-of-destruction [JoD] games shows that some people may be quite nasty. We study to what extent these behaviors are context dependent: If people are nice or nasty,...

Self-regulatory organizations (SROs) can be found in education, healthcare, and other not-for-profit sectors as well as the accounting, financial, and legal professions. DeMarzo et al. (2005) show theoretically that SROs can create monopoly market power for their affiliated agents, but that...