This study considers prospects for the revitalization of social norms after ethnic violence using a behavioral experiment in postwar Bosnia. In the experiment, subjects are asked to distribute a ten-unit monetary sum between two anonymous recipients of random ethnicity. The results indicate a...

We study the effect of individual exposure to civil conflict on trust and preferences for market participation. We conducted behavioral experiments and surveys among 426 randomly selected individuals more than a decade after the end of the Tajik civil war. We find that exposure to violence...

Crises and disasters, whether natural or man-made, are defined by conditions of uncertainty, disorder, and stress. In this research, we explore the extent to which individuals who were evacuated from New Orleans to Houston in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina cooperated with one another in a...

Our research provides experimental and survey evidence on the pro-social behavior (trust, reciprocity, a sense of fairness) and preferences for anonymous market transactions of former combatants. Our results, from a random sample in post-war Tajikistan, show that trust, reciprocity, generosity...

Recent studies have reported surprising increases in pro-social behavior following exposure to conflict. However, our research provides cautionary evidence of some important detrimental effects of conflict hidden within an overall trend toward increasing certain pro-social preferences. We draw...

This paper proposes a novel semi-analytical approach for solving the dynamic user equilibrium (DUE) of a bottleneck model with general heterogeneous users. The proposed approach makes use of the analytical solutions from the bottleneck analysis to create an equivalent assignment problem that...

A puzzling feature of conspicuous consumption, given its role in signaling wealth, is that it is not more conspicuous. For example, luxury handbags are often available in multiple variants that differ in logo visibility; in fact, subtly branded handbags are often more expensive than their loudly...