Self-reported life satisfaction is highly heterogeneous across similar countries. We show that this phenomenon can be largely explained by the fact that individuals adopt different scales and benchmarks in evaluating themselves. Using a cross sectional dataset on individuals aged 50 and over in...

This paper presents an experimental investigation of persuasion bias, a form of bounded rationality whereby agents communicating through a social network are unable to account for possible repetitions in the information they receive. The results indicate that network structure plays a...

We study individual behaviour in a repeated linear public good experiment in which, in each period, subjects are required to contribute a minimum level and face a certain probability to be audited. Audited subjects who contribute less than the minimum level are convicted to pay the difference...

The main findings of the theory on the private provision of public goods under the assumptions of symmetric agents and normality are that (1) there exists a unique Nash equilibrium in which everybody contributes the same; and (2) this pattern is stable. We show that these findings no longer hold...

According to the modern theory of social capital (see Coleman (1990), Putnam (1993), Fukuyama (1995)), widespread trust would influence the economic performances of a country through a) reduction of transactional costs (monitoring and preventive activities to protect themselves from being...

This paper investigates fund-raising mechanisms based on a prize as a way to overcome free riding in the private provision of public goods, under the assumptions of income heterogeneity and incomplete information about income levels. We compare experimentally the performance of a lottery, an...

This paper presents an experimental investigation of persuasion bias, a form of bounded rationality whereby agents communicating through a social network are unable to account for repetitions in the information they receive. We find that, after repeated communication within a social network,...

We present a two-country equilibrium model with search costs in which the structural characteristics of the labor market in each economy affects the relationship between immigration and crime. The main result of the model is that countries with ?flexible labor markets are likely to see a...