Do people care about intentions? Good intentions often do not produce good results when a person tries to do something nice for someone else. In this paper, we ask under what circumstances do people pay attention to outcomes and under what circumstances do they focus on intentions. While the...

Papers such as Akerlof and Yellen (1990) and Rabin (1993) argue that considerations such as fairness and reciprocity are important in individual decision-making. The gift-exchange game (Fehr, Kirchsteiger & Reidl, 1993, and many others) has established that, in the laboratory, higher wages...