Drawing on contrasting theoretical perspectives of self-interest and utilitarian/ethical motivations, we examine the degree to which a company's pace of departure from Russia after the Ukraine invasion is driven by its exposure to the Russian market. Moreover, we investigate whether firm-level...

Many experimental studies report that economics students tend to act more selfishly than students of other disciplines, a finding that received widespread public and professional attention. Two main explanations that the existing literature offers for the differences found in the behavior...

While headline news frequently report cases of large-scale fraud, corruption, and other immoral behavior, laboratory experiments often show prosocial behavior in strategic games. To reconcile and explain these seemingly conflicting observations, Al'os-Ferrer et al. (2022) introduced the Big...

Rising wealth inequality and squeezed public budgets has brought wealth tax back into policy discussions. A net wealth tax might help to boost state revenue and reduce wealth inequality. Yet little is known about citizens’ attitudes towards the design of a net wealth tax (i.e. the tax unit,...

Abstract This paper demonstrates that people manipulate their ambiguity aversion when it is self-serving. In an online experiment, subjects are asked to choose between a selfish option and an altruistic option. Under the altruistic option, the charity’s payoff depends on an ambiguous lottery,...

Generative artificial intelligence holds enormous potential to revolutionize decision-making processes, from everyday to high-stake scenarios. However, as many decisions carry social implications, for AI to be a reliable assistant for decision-making it is crucial that it is able to capture the...

Based on the National Children’s Study of China, this study examines the relationship between children’s only-child status and prosocial behaviors. This study employed several approaches to identify the relationship between only-child status and children’s prosocial behaviors. The results...

People with higher-incomes tend to support less redistribution than lower-income people. This has been attributed not only to self-interest, but also to psychological mechanisms including differing beliefs about the hard work or luck underlying inequality, differing fairness views, and differing...

Human drivers routinely make implicit tradeoffs between their selfish interests and the safety of passengers, as when they perform a rolling stop in order to reach their destination faster. Here I explore whether they are comfortable with autonomous vehicles (AVs) that encode similar selfish...

Members of various species engage in altruism — i.e. accepting personal costs to benefit others. Here we present an incentivized experiment to test for altruistic behavior among AI agents consisting of large language models developed by the private company OpenAI. Using real incentives for AI...

The purpose of this study was to determine whether attitudes toward risk and altruism are affected by being in a group or being alone. In contrast to previous economic research on group decision-making, we excluded the effects of group informal discussions, which are thought to be a "black box"...

Many environment related public goods require investment of time or effort rather than simply money. Yet, most experimental studies on public good games focus on a distribution of money. In the present paper, we report results from an experiment (N=181) comparing an effort based public goods...

We investigate the effect of different procedures for assigning decision-making roles for the distribution of collective resources using a dictator game. Three role allocation procedures are tested, namely random, meritocratic, and favouritism. We contribute to the literature by employing an...

Many studies find that public law enforcers have self-interested reasons to maximize financial recoveries. We analyze a principal-agent model where a social-welfare-maximizing government needs to motivate self-interested law enforcers to exert enforcement effort to detect offending firms,...

A rational miner may gain from withholding blocks and strategically timing the release to orphan the others' blocks, which questions the existence of honest majority and blockchain concensus. This paper reconciles the discrepancy between the absence of block-withholding attacks in practice and...

As environmental behavior is still uncommon in developing countries and needs to be popularized, research on the factors for engaging in certain green practices is of high relevance. The aim of this study is to determine how self-interests of individuals of the Arctic zone of Russia influence...

In this paper, we show that the election of a new school board member causes home values in their neighborhood to rise. This increase is identified using narrowly-decided contests and is driven by non-Democratic members, whose neighborhoods appreciate about 4% on average relative to those of...

Understanding the mechanisms that guide NGOs (non-governmental organisations)’ managerial decisions is key to effective development policies. One fundamentally strategic decision is the number of activities an NGO offers. We provide a conceptual framework based on the agency theory to study...

We use a controlled laboratory experiment to study the causal impact of income decreases within a time period on redistribution decisions at the end of that period, in an environment where we keep fixed the sum of incomes over the period. First, we investigate the effect of a negative income...

within a time period on redistribution decisions at the end of that period, in an environmentwhere we keep fixed the sum of incomes over the period. First, we inves-tigate the effect of anegative income trend (intra-personal decrease), which means a decreasing income comparedto one’s recent...

Why does human cooperation often unravel in economic experiments despite a promising start? Previous studies have interpreted the decline as the reaction of disappointed cooperators retaliating in response to lesser cooperators (conditional cooperation). This interpretation has been considered...

We ask how the ESG performance of firms affects the asset allocation of a large sample of French employees between their employer’s stock and alternative investments in firm-sponsored savings plans. After ESG incidents, employees are less likely to invest and they invest smaller amounts in...

Based on the National Children’s Study of China (NCSC), this study examines the causal relationship between the only-child status and children’s prosocial behaviors. Estimates indicate that the only children significantly exhibit higher prosocial tendencies than non-only children in terms of...

This research explores the influences of selfish personalities of the Dark Triad on start-up intention and motives based on a sample of 400 university students in Vietnam, discovering mixed effects of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. A high level of narcissism and Machiavellianism...

The selfish life-cycle model or hypothesis is, together with the dynasty or altruism model, the most widely used theoretical model of household behavior in economics, but does this model apply in the case of a country like Japan, which is said to have closer family ties than other countries? In...