An active area of research within the social sciences concerns the underlying motivation for sharing scarce resources and engaging in other pro-social actions. We develop a theoretical framework that sheds light on the developmental origins of social preferences by providing mechanisms through...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the mechanisms by which decisions about others are affected by the information known about them. The authors argue that the availability of information about deep-level attributes diminishes the role of surface-level attributes in how people...

Abstract The ownership and governance of for-profit (FP), nonprofit (NP), and local government (LG) organizations are different. Therefore, the objectives of these different types of organizations and their performance may differ. We conjecture that in markets where there is substantial...

This paper documents the changes in human resource practices from the early 1980s to the middle of the 1990s, using a unique and comprehensive data set concerning a sample of about 800 firms from a wide rage of industries in the state of Minnesota. A major aspect in these changes concerns the...

We show that the distinction between Self and Other, ‘us’ and ‘them,’ or in-group and out-group, affects significantly economic and social behavior. In a series of experiments with approximately 200 Midwestern students as our subjects, we found that they favor those who are similar to...

In the one-shot trust or investment game without opportunities for reputation formation or contracting, economic theory predicts no trusting because there is no incentive for trustworthiness. Under these conditions, theory predicts (a) no effect of pre-play communication, and (b) universal...