There is a large literature evaluating the dual process model of cognition, including the biases and heuristic it implies. To advance this literature, we focus on what triggers decision makers to switch from the intuitive process (aka System 1) to the more deliberative process (aka System 2)....

We extend the literature structurally estimating social preferences by accounting for the desire to adhere to social norms. Our representative agent is strongly motivated by norms and failing to account for this causes us to overestimate how much agents care about helping those who are worse...

Empirical studies of the principal-agent relationship find that extrinsic incentives work in many instances, linking rewards to performance increases effort, but that they can also backfire, reducing effort. Intrinsic motivation, the internal drive to work to master a skill or to improve one's...

Monitoring by peers is often an effective means of attenuating incentive problems. Most explanations of the efficacy of mutual monitoring rely either on small group size or on a version of the Folk theorem with repeated interactions which requires reasonably accurate public information...

The enforcement of social norms often requires that unaffected third parties sanction offenders. Given the renewed interest of economists in norms, the literature on third party punishment is surprisingly thin, however. In this paper, we report on the results of an experiment designed to...

We define social reciprocity as the act of demonstrating one's disapproval, at some personal cost, for the violation of widely-held norms (e.g., don't free ride). Social reciprocity differs from standard notions of reciprocity because social reciprocators intervene whenever a norm is violated...

Economic theory predicts that agents will work harder if they believe in the mission of the organization. Well-identified estimates of exactly how much harder they will work have been elusive, however, because agents select into jobs. We conduct a real effort experiment with participants who...

The theory of compensating differentials has proven difficult to test with observational data: the consequences of selection, unobserved firm and worker characteristics, and the broader macroeconomic environment complicate most analyses. Instead, we construct experimental, real-effort labor...

Viewed through the lens of the prominent two-system model of decision making, behavioral economics is seen as studying the tension between impulses (System 1) and rationality (System 2). In this context, two strategies, "de-biasing" informing agents of their biases and "counter-biasing" using...

The perception of risk affects how people behave during crises. We conduct a series of experiments to explore how people form COVID-19 mortality risk beliefs and the implications for prosocial behavior. We first document that people overestimate their own risk and that of young people, while...