Decision-makers commonly avoid information on uncertain social effects of their privately beneficial choices. The dominant theory holds that such "strategic ignorance" is a means to circumvent inner moral conflict while acting self-servingly. In extension of the theory, we hypothesize that time...

In a laboratory experiment, using a game in which a “decider” determines her own payoff and the payoff of a “stakeholder” by choosing between two payoff allocations, we analyze the effect of time pressure on self-serving behavior under two transparency conditions. Under “transparent...

Compliance with COVID-19 measures in the workplace is a vital component of society’s strategy for mitigating the effects of the pandemic. We trial well-established behavioural interventions (social norms, pledging, messenger effects) in a field setting. We use daily reports of own and...

In three different variants of an one-shot public good game I analyze the relationship between cooperation and cognitive abilities, assessed through the cognitive reflection test (CRT). In a between-subjects design, the baseline case is contrasted with two treatment conditions that allow to...

We test the hypothesis that protest participation decisions in an adult population of potential climate protesters are interdependent. Subjects (n = 1,510) from four German cities were recruited two weeks before protest date. We measured participation and beliefs about the other subjects'...

Is feedback on trustworthiness necessary for the functioning of economic relationships? In many real-world economic environments, such feedback can at best be acquired through costly monitoring, raising questions of how trust and efficiency can be maintained. In the lab, we conduct a modified...

Previous research shows that humans display complexity aversion. In this article, we test for the presence of complexity aversion and its determinants in the context of voluntary climate action, where individual choices interact with the complex regulatory framework of the EU Emission Trading...

This paper studies monitoring and punishment behavior by second and third parties in a cooperation experiment with endogenous information structures: Players are uninformed whether the target player cooperated or defected at the cooperation stage, but can decide to resolve the information...