This experimental study asks whether generosity decreases emotional distance, a question pertinent to human service quality. Highly vulnerable service recipients may not enforce quality standards. Quality can then be viewed as an act of generosity, a gift from the provider to the recipient. For...

This paper examines the reflexive interplay between individual decisions and social forces to analyze the evolution of cooperation in the presence of "multi-directedness," whereby people's preferences depend on their psychological motives. People have access to multiple, discrete motives....

There is by now ample evidence from laboratory experiments that individuals exhibit "prosocial" or "other-regarding" preferences. However, a key question is whether the importance of other-regarding preferences documented in the laboratory can be readily generalized to draw conclusions about the...

This paper seeks to extend the domain of identity economics by exploring motivational foundations of in-group cooperation and out-group competition. On this basis, we explore the reflexive interaction between individual economic decisions and social identities in response to technological change...

We report two information cascade game experiments that directly test the impact of altruism on observational learning. Participants interact in two parallel sequences, the observed and the unobserved sequence. Only the actions of the observed entail informational benefits to subsequent...

Evidence from studies in international relations, the politics of reform, collective action and price competition suggests that economic agents in social dilemma situations cooperate more to avoid losses than in the pursuit of gains. To test whether the prospect of losses can induce cooperation,...

We examine whether spillovers of pro-social behavior depend on how behavioral changes are induced. We conduct a large experiment using economic games, with a Dictator Game (DG) followed by either an identical game or a Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD). We influence initial behavior through widely used...