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...

What explains variability in norms of cooperation across organizations and cultures? One answer comes from the internalization of norms prescribing behavior that is typically successful under the institutions that govern one's daily life. These norms are then carried over into atypical...

The literature on proper scoring rules has mostly studied the case of risk neutral agents. We analytically investigate how risk averse, expected utility maximizing forecasters behave when presented with risk neutral proper scoring rules. If the state variable is binary, risk averse agents shade...

Decision makers in health, public policy, technology, and social science are increasingly interested in going beyond ‘one-size-fits-all' policies to personalized ones. Thus, they are faced with the problem of estimating heterogeneous causal effects. Unfortunately, estimating heterogeneous...

How can behavioral scientists incorporate tools from machine learning (ML)? We propose that ML models can be used as upper bounds for the “explainable” variance in a given data set and thus serve as upper bounds for the potential power of a theory. We demonstrate this method in the domain of...

Human information processing is often modeled as costless Bayesian inference. However, research in psychology shows that attention is a computationally costly and potentially limited resource. We thus study Bayesian agents for whom computing posterior beliefs is costly; such agents face a...

Economic theories of punishment focus on determining the levels that provide maximal social material payoffs. In calculating these levels several parameters are key: total social costs, total social benefits and the probability that offenders are apprehended. However, levels of punishment often...

The public goods game is the classic laboratory paradigm for studying collective action problems. Each participant chooses how much to contribute to a common pool that returns benefits to all participants equally. The ideal outcome occurs if everybody contributes the maximum amount, but the...