Pro-social and ethical behavior primarily understood as the ability to sacrifice ones own interest to the benefit of others leads to welfare improvements and social progress, whereas anti-social and unethical actions result in irrevocable welfare losses and destruction. This dissertation...

Delineation of someone's ownership typically involves the sense of deservedness: the property right is respected as long as the owner deserve to own the object. Objectively, deservedness is often linked to one's actions or specific attributes that justify the owner's claims. We argue that people...

Experimental literature on pro-social behavior has been largely focused on settings where the decision of donors is sufficient for an interaction to occur. However, in many real-life applications recipients first have to ask donors for help to initiate the transaction. We suggest that this first...

Social comparison feedback, i.e. informing people about the behavior of others, has been shown to influence prosocial behavior in many domains, including tax compliance and energy conservation. We argue that heterogeneity in people's (un)willingness to consult the corresponding information...

The aim of this study is to find out why people are telling the truth: is it a desire to respect trust, to avoid losses for others, or a mere distaste for lying per se? To answer this question we study a sender-receiver game where it is possible to delegate the act of lying and where it is...

Dealing with temptations requires self-control. If lying for money constitutes a temptation, restricting people's self-control resources would enhance unethical behavior. We argue that the effect of the selfcontrol on lying depends on two things: 1) easiness to grasp the opportunity to lie, and...

This field experiment quantifies the impact of social norm information on the demand for indoor temperature. Based on high-frequency data from indoor temperature monitors, we provide participating households with a comparison of average temperature in their apartments relative to that measured...

We study the role of reciprocity in markets where expert-sellers have more information about the severity of a problem faced by a consumer. We employ a standard experimental credence goods market to introduce the possibility for consumers to gift the expert-seller before the diagnostic, where...

One's willingness to accept an outcome or even to correct it depends on whether or not the underlying procedure is deemed legitimate. We manipulate the role allocation procedure in the dictator game to illustrate that this belief is not independent of the outcome and is self-serving in its...