This paper presents the results of a policy oriented macroeconomic experiment involving an ‘international’ economy with a relatively small ‘home’ country and a large ‘foreign’ country. It compares the economic performance of two alternative tax systems: a wage tax system and a...

Cooperation is central to human societies. Yet relatively little is known about the cognitive underpinnings of cooperative decision-making. Does cooperation require deliberate self-restraint? Or is spontaneous prosociality reined in by calculating self-interest? Here we present a theory of why...

In one-shot dictator game variations that manipulate the social context without changing the game with respect to outcome-oriented social preferences, women are highly sensitive to the social context. In line with previous research on gender differences in social behavior, women display more...

While many economic interactions feature “All-or-Nothing” options nudging investors towards going “all-in,” such designs may unintentionally affect reciprocity. We manipulate the investor’s action space in two versions of the “trust game.” In one version investors can invest either...

Various theories of social behavior propose that individuals condition actions that involve a moral value by following each other’s behavior. The theoretical and experimental instruments employed to evaluate this conditioning, often focus only on the diffusion of actions with negative moral...

This paper studies behavior in experiments with a linear voluntary contributions mechanism for public goods conducted in Japan, the Netherlands, Spain and the USA. The same experimental design was used in the four countries. Our 'contribution function' design allows us to obtain a view of...

Over two days in February 1988, several key experimental economists and cognitive psychologists met to explore the possibilities of joint research promoted by the Sloan and Russell Sage Foundations under the rubric behavioral economics. The original vision that the meeting could open a line of...

In this paper, we discuss learning behavior and the heterogeneity of subjects' ability to perform in real-effort tasks. Afterwards, we present a novel variant of Erkal et al.'s (2011) encryption real-effort task which aims to minimize learning behavior in repeated settings. In the task,...

Many experimental studies report that economics students tend to act more selfishly than students of other disciplines, a finding that received widespread public and professional attention. Two main explanations that the existing literature offers for the differences found in the behavior...

Those who receive help may be more likely to help a third party. This pay-it-forward behavior, called generalized reciprocity, can be powerful in spreading kindness from person to person. We use laboratory games to explore the psychological motivations that contribute to generalized reciprocity....