We study social learning in a large population of agents who only observe the actions taken by their neighbours. Agents have to choose one, out of two, reversible actions, each optimal in one, out of two, unknown states of the world. Each agent chooses rationally, on the basis of private...

Imitation of the successful choices of others is a simple and superficially attractive learning rule. It has been shown to be an important driving force for the strategic behavior of (young) adults. In this study we examine whether imitation is prevalent in the behavior of children aged between...

Multiple sources of funding are becoming increasingly important for charitable organizations. Donations from corporate donors for example account for 25–35% of charitable income for the largest US charities, across charitable sectors. This note presents some tentative first evidence from a...

From the regulation of sports to lawmaking in parliament, in many situations one group of people (“agents”) make decisions that affect the payoffs of others (“principals”) who may offer action-contingent transfers in order to sway the agents' decisions. Prat and Rustichini (2003)...

In an artefactual field experiment, we implemented a crowdfunding campaign for an institute’s summer party and compared donation and contribution framings. We found that the use of the word ‘donation’ generated higher revenue than the use of ‘contribution.’ While the individuals...

In many economic contexts, an elusive variable of interest is the agent's belief about relevant events, e.g. about other agents' behavior. A growing number of surveys and experiments asks participants to state beliefs explicitly but little is known about the causal relation between beliefs and...

We measure the prevalence of discrimination between Jordanian host and Syrian refugee children attending school in Jordan. Using a simple sharing experiment, we find only a small degree of out-group discrimination. However, Jordanian children with Palestinian roots do not discriminate at all,...

Human cooperation has been explained through rationality as well as heuristics-based models. Both model classes share the feature that knowledge of payoff functions is weakly beneficial for the emergence of cooperation. Here, we present experimental evidence to the contrary. We let human...

We present evidence from a natural field experiment designed to shed light on whether individual behavior is consistent with a neoclassical model of utility maximization subject to budget constraints. We do this through the lens of a field experiment on charitable giving. We find that the...