This article studies whether people want to control which information on their own past pro-social behavior is revealed to other people. Participants in an experiment are assigned a color which depends on their own past pro-sociality. They can then spend money to increase or decrease the...

Self-signaling theory argues that individuals partly behave prosocially to create or uphold a favorable self-image. To study self-signaling theory, we investigate whether increasing self-image concerns affects charitable giving. In our experiment subjects divide 20 euros between themselves and a...

We study strategic interaction in an experimental social-preferences vacuum chamber. We mute social preferences by letting participants knowingly interact with computers. Our new design allows for indirect strategic interaction: there are several waves in which computer players inherit the...

We investigate how heterogeneous social preferences affect the communication of painful information in social relationships. We characterize the existence conditions for a pooling equilibrium in which individuals conceal painful information because revealing the latter would signal that they are...

We study strategic interaction in an experimental social-preferences vacuum chamber. We mute social preferences by letting participants knowingly interact with computers. Our new design allows for indirect strategic interaction: there are several waves in which computer players inherit the...

This paper examines the potential reinforcement of motivated beliefs when individuals with identical biases communicate. We propose a controlled online experiment that allows to manipulate belief biases and the communication environment. We find that communication, even among like-minded...

We test the claim that game form misconception among subjects making choices through the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) value elicitation procedure provides an explanation for the endowment effect, as suggested by Cason and Plott (forthcoming). We employ a design that allows us to clearly...

An auction is externality-robust if unilateral deviations from equilibrium leave the other bidders' payoffs unaffected. The equilibrium and its outcome will then persist if certain types of externalities arise between bidders. One example are externalities due to spiteful preferences, which have...

This paper studies whether people can avoid punishment by remaining willfully ignorant about possible negative consequences of their actions for others. We employ a laboratory experiment, using modified dictator games in which a dictator can remain willfully ignorant about the payoff...