This study tests the hypothesis that hypothetical bias may not be related to value elicitation; rather it may be a value formation problem. When participants are asked to indicate their willingness to pay for an induced value good, we find no evidence of hypothetical bias for three different...

Significant difference between response to real and hypothetical valuation questions is often referred to as hypothetical bias. Some economists have had success with using "cheap talk" (which entails reading a script that explicitly highlights the hypothetical bias problem before participants...

Individuals are widely believed to overstate their economic valuation of a good by a factor of two or three. This paper reports the results of a meta-analysis of hypothetical bias in 28 stated preference valuation studies that report monetary willingness-to-pay and that used the same mechanism...

This paper examines the role of simplified heuristics in the formation of preferences for public goods. Political scientists have suggested that voters use simplified heuristics based on the positions of familiar parties to infer how a proposed policy will affect them and to cast a vote in line...

Our research investigates whether social preferences are stable across contexts in the field. We build a unique data set by recruiting participants from a low-income urban neighborhood to participate in a series of laboratory experiments. Their decisions are used to demonstrate the stability of...

There is a large body of evidence showing that a substantial proportion of people contribute positive amounts in public goods games, even if the situation is one-shot and completely anonymous. Clearly, this is in conflict with the prediction of neoclassic economic theory. One of the most...

The opportunity to tell a white lie (i.e., a lie that benefits another person) generates a moral conflict between two opposite moral dictates, one pushing towards telling always the truth and the other pushing towards helping others. Here we study how people resolve this moral conflict. What...

This paper studies the impact of inequity aversion preferences (Fehr and Schmidt, 1999) in a "repeated" public goods game. We assume that agents care about the expected payoff differences among themselves over all periods of a game, so that it is in fact a dynamic game that is being played. In...

Evidence suggests that there are substantial and systematic differences in cooperation rates under varying framing conditions in social dilemmas. Several explanations of these differences have been presented. Some (e.g. McCusker and Carnevale, 1995; van Dijk and Wilke, 2000) argue that social frames...

Theories of fairness preferences have gained remarkable attention throughout much of recent economic literature. Formal models have been proposed which are able to explain behaviour that is yet unexplained by the classical model of the strictly egocentric economic man ("homo oeconomicus"). These...