A donation may have ambiguous costs or ambiguous benefits. In a laboratory experiment, we show that individuals use this ambiguity strategically as a moral wiggle room to behave less generously without feeling guilty. Such excuse-driven behavior is more pronounced when the costs of a donation...

Studying the likelihood that individuals cheat requires a valid statistical measure of dishonesty. We develop an easy empirical method to measure and compare lying behavior within and across studies to correct for sampling errors. This method estimates the full distribution of lying when agents...

The memory people have of their past actions is one of the main sources of information about themselves. To study whether people retrieve their memory self-servingly, we designed an experiment in which participants have first to play binary dictator games and, second, recall the amounts...

Donors usually need intermediaries to transfer their donations to recipients. A risk is that donations can be embezzled before they reach the recipients. Using psychological game theory, we design a novel three-player Embezzlement Mini-Game to study whether intermediaries suffer from guilt...

Is success in a task used strategically by individuals to motivate their beliefs prior to taking action in a subsequent, unrelated, task? Also, is the distortion of beliefs reinforced for individuals who have lower status in society? Conducting an artefactual field experiment in India, we show...

While previous research has shown that social preferences develop in childhood, we study whether this development is accompanied by reduced use of deception when lies would harm others, and increased use of deception to benefit others. In a sample of children aged between 7 and 14, we find...

Using a laboratory experiment with nested local and global public goods, we analyze the stability of global groups when individuals have the option to separate, according to the degree of decentralization of decision-making. We show that increasing the number of decisions made at the local level...

We use a laboratory experiment to understand the channels through which honesty oaths can affect behavior and credibility. Using a game with asymmetric information in a financial market setting that captures some important features of advisor-investor interactions, we manipulate the common...

Improving cognitive function and reducing stress may yield important benefits to individuals' health and to society. We conduct an experiment involving a three-month within-firm training program based on the principles of mindfulness and positive psychology at three large companies. We find an...

Deterrence institutions are widely used in modern societies to discourage rule violations but whether they have an impact beyond their immediate scope of application is usually ignored. Using a quasi-experiment, we found evidence of spillover effects across contexts. We identified fraudsters and...