Trust is a cornerstone of economic development. Further, trust is promoted within religious groups and might even be the very reason religions emerged. The U.S. stands out as particularly religious, compared to other Western countries. Yet, little is known about trust within and across its...

In this study, we propose a stochastic choice model to identify the motivations of prosocial behavior. We focus on the role of inequity aversion in outcome-based preferences and the shame of acting selfishly in social concerns. We employ an additively perturbed utility model to social...

We analyze the offering, asking, and granting of help or other benefits as a three-stage game with bilateral private information between a person in need of help and a potential help-giver. Asking entails the risk of rejection, which can be painful: since unawareness of the need can no longer be...

Narratives pervade almost any aspect of our life and play a particularly important role in moral and prosocial decision-making. We study how positive (stories in favor of a prosocial action) and negative (stories in favor of a selfish action) narratives influence prosocial behavior. Our main...

We analyze communication about the social returns to investment in a public good. We model two agents who have private information about these returns as well as their own taste for cooperation, or social preferences. Before deciding to contribute or not, each agent submits an unverifiable...

We analyze the offering, asking, and granting of help or other benefits as a three-stage game with bilateral private information between a person in need of help and a potential help-giver. Asking entails the risk of rejection, which can be painful: since unawareness of the need can no longer be...

We analyze the offering, asking, and granting of help or other benefits as a three-stage game with bilateral private information between a person in need of help and a potential help-giver. Asking entails the risk of rejection, which can be painful: since unawareness of the need can no longer be...

Recent research has studied heterogeneity in universalism vs. in-group favoritism to explain various economic and political behaviors. This paper documents that displayed universalism is significantly affected by social signaling concerns resulting from the anticipation of future economic...

Scholars have long recognized the difficulties of communicating risk to the public. The rise of mobile gaming presents unprecedented opportunities for risk communicators to reach millions of potential users in engaging and potentially effective ways. Gamifying risk communication may help users...

We investigate the trade-off between the opportunity costs of decisions and their quality in a simple model. In a lab experiment, we introduce exogenous variation in the opportunity costs of time. Contrary to claims in the previous literature, we show that using more time when making small-stake...