Economists have traditionally treated preferences as exogenously given. Preferences are assumed to be influenced by neither beliefs nor the constraints people face. As a consequence, changes in behaviour are explained exclusively in terms of changes in the set of feasible alternatives. Here the...

We comprehensively investigate misperceptions about pro-social behavior and the extent to which punishment and rewarding is under- or overestimated in laboratory experiments. Our games and treatments cover a large range of decision environments, in which there are different (i) trade-offs (e.g.,...

In recent years, many social scientists have claimed that trust plays an important role in economic and social transactions. Despite its proposed importance, the measurement and the definition of trust seem to be not fully settled, and the identification of the exact role of trust in economic...