The measurement of social norms plays a pivotal role in many social sciences.While economists predominantly conduct experiments, sociologistsrather employ (factorial) surveys. Both methods, however, suer from distinctweaknesses. Experiments, on the one hand, often fall short in themeasurement of...

During the last three decades the ascent of behavioral economics clearly helped tobring down artificial disciplinary boundaries between psychology and economics.Noting that behavioral economics seems still under the spell of the rational choicetradition – and, indirectly, of behaviorism – we...

Human decision making is a process guided by different and partly competing mo-tivations that can each dominate behavior and lead to different effects depending on strength and circumstances. “Over-stylizing” neglects such competing concerns and context-dependence, although it facilitates...

This paper investigates distributive justice using a fourfold experimental design:The ignorance and the risk scenarios are combined with the self-concernand the umpire modes. We study behavioral switches between self-concernand umpire mode and investigate the goodness of ten standards of...

Fairness is a strong concern as shown by dictator and ultimatum experiments. Efficiency, measured by the sum of individual payoffs, is a potentially competing concern in games such as the prisoners' dilemma. In our experiment participants can increase efficiency by gift giving. In the one-sided...

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...

Debates about affirmative action often revolve around fairness. Accordingly, we document substantial heterogeneity in the fairness perception of various affirmative action policies. But do these differences translate into different consequences? In a laboratory experiment, we study three...

A main goal of affirmative action (AA) policies is to enable disadvantaged groups to compete with their privileged counterparts. Existing theoretical and empirical research documents that incorporating AA can result in both more egalitarian outcomes and higher exerted efforts. However, the...

A main goal of affirmative action (AA) policies is to enable disadvantaged groups to compete with their privileged counterparts. Existing theoretical and empirical research documents that incorporating AA can result in both more egalitarian outcomes and higher exerted efforts. However, the...

The existing literature acknowledges that a mismatch between the experimenter'sand the subjects' models of an experimental task can adversely aect the interpretation ofdata from laboratory experiments. We discuss why the two common experimental designs(between-subjects and within-subjects) used...