We report results from a laboratory experiment that explores the effects of preference communication and leader selection mechanisms in group decision-making. In a setting where all members of a group get the same payoff based on the group leader’s decision of how much risk to take, we study...

Recent empirical research has demonstrated that countries with higher levels of religiosity are characterized by greater income inequality. We argue that this is due to the lower level of government services demanded in more religious countries. Religion motivates individuals to engage in...

We investigate whether the February 2012 amendments to the Check Law in Turkey that replaced imprisonment with administrative fines for issuing bad checks were a driver of the surge in bad checks since late 2011. As the change in the law was foreseen, we argue that check issuance behavior was...

Studies in family economics and anthropology suggest that grandmothers are a highly valuable source of childcare assistance. As such, availability of grandmothers affects the cost of having children, and hence fertility decisions of young parents. In this paper, we develop a simple model to...

Conditional commitment devices such as price matching guarantees or legal contracts can be highly efficient and improve the outcomes for involved parties. In the context of public goods, however, empirical evidence on the cooperation-enhancing effect of conditional commitments is scarce. In this...

We report results from a laboratory experiment that explores the effects of preference communication and leader selection mechanisms in group decision-making. In a setting where all members of a group get the same payoff based on the group leader's decision of how much risk to take, we study the...