Teams are becoming increasingly important in work settings.  We develop a framework to study the strategic implications of a meritocratic notion of desert under which team members care about receiving what they feel they deserve.  Team members find it painful to receive less than their...

The underlying motivations for envy or related social preferences and their impact on agricultural innovations are examined by combining data from money burning experimental game and household survey from Ethiopia.  In the first stage of the money burning experimental game, income inequality is...

Using data from experimental games and household survey from 1,200 married couples in three sites in Ethiopia, this paper uses different versions of a voluntary contribution mechanism to test for household efficiency.  The experimental and econometric analyses provide many interesting results...

Using a South African data set, the paper poses six questions about the determinants of subjective well-being. Much of the paper is concerned with the role of relative concepts. We find that comparator income – measured as average income of others in the local residential cluster - enters the...

We present experimental evidence which sheds new light on why women may be less competitive than men.  Specifically, we observe striking differences in how men and women respond to good and bad luck in a competitive environment.  Following a loss, women tend to reduce effort, and the effect is...

The exchange between Epstein (2010) and Klibanoff et al. (2012) identified a behavioral issue that sharply distinguishes between two classes of models of ambiguity sensitivity, exemplified by the Î±-MEU model and the smooth ambiguity model, respectively. The issue in question is whether a...

We develop a novel computerized real effort task, based on moving sliders across a screen, to test experimentally whether agents are disappointment averse when they compete in a real effort sequential-move tournament.  Our theory predicts that a disappointment averse agent, who is loss averse...

The empirical literature on the economics of happiness has grown rapidly, and much has been learned about the determinants of subjective well-being.  Less attention has been paid to its normative implications.  Taking China as a case study, this paper first summarises empirical results on the...

This paper studies the interaction of incentive pay and social distance in the dissemination of information.  We analyse theoretically as well as empirically the effect of incentive pay when agents have pro-social objectives, but also preferences over dealing with one social group relative to...

Recently, the international community has increased its commitment to prosecute malicious dictators - for example by establishing the International Criminal Court.  This has raised the international community's loss associated with being time-inconsistent (i.e.: granting amnesties ex post), the...