Basic sanitation facilities are still lacking in large parts of the developing world, engendering serious environmental health risks. Interventions commonly deliver in-kind or cash subsidies to promote private toilet ownership. In this paper, we assess an intervention that provides information...

Basic sanitation facilities are still lacking in large parts of the developing world, engendering serious environmental health risks. Interventions commonly deliver in-kind or cash subsidies to promote private toilet ownership. In this paper, we assess an intervention that provides information...

We show that the descendants of ancient farmers may have an interest in marrying among themselves, and thus maintaining the gendered division of labour originally justified on comparative- advantage grounds by the advent of the plough even after they emigrate to a modern industrial economy where...

We experimentally investigate whether individuals strategically distort their beliefs about dominant norms. Embedded in the context of lying, we systematically vary both the nature of elicited beliefs (descriptive about what others do, or normative about what others approve of) and whether...

We investigate the causal impact of public discourse on socially responsible market behavior. We conduct laboratory market experiments with products that differ in their production costs and social impact, and provide market actors and impacted third parties with the opportunity to discuss...

"Roman Frugality offers the first-ever systematic analysis of the variants of individual and collective self-restraint that shaped ancient Rome throughout its history and had significant repercussions in post-classical times. In particular, it tries to do the complexity of a phenomenon justice...

We show that the descendants of ancient farmers may have an interest in maintaining the gendered division of labour originally justified on comparative-advantage grounds by the advent of the plough even after they emigrate to a modern industrial economy where individual productivity depends on...

We examine two Pakistani programs to see if the public disclosure of tax information and social recognition of top taxpayers promote tax compliance. Pakistan began revealing income tax paid by every taxpayer in the country from 2012. Simultaneously, another program began recognizing and...

This study examines the influence of client preference with respect to information search behavior and subsequent tax recommendation. Prior studies have identified that tax consultants exhibit confirmation bias in their information search processes, which is explained by the theory of motivated...

In many situations, social norms govern behavior. While the existence of a norm may be clear to someone entering the situation, it is often less clear precisely what behavior is required in order to comply with the norm. We investigate how people react to uncertainty about the prevailing norm...

Since the 1959 revolution, the Cuban state has committed to women's empowerment and enacted a series of laws and policies to promote women's equal and active participation in all spheres of life. Sources agree that Cuba has made remarkable progress towards women's economic empowerment and gender...

We show that the discontinuity in the distribution of surveyed female income shares at the margin where a woman would outearn her partner is primarily driven by norm induced misreporting in surveys. We draw on unique Swiss data combining survey and administrative information for the same...

We examine how work norms affect Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) take-up rates in response to worsening economic conditions. By focusing on immigrants in the US, we can consider the influence of work norms in a person's home country, which we argue are exogenous to labor market...

Do people conform to social norms at least partly to signal their social preferences? Using a vignette experiment, we find that parents who do not marry off their under-age daughters in Malawian villages where child marriage is prevalent are perceived as less altruistic, reciprocal, and...

Both theory and recent empirical evidence on nudging suggest that observability of behavior acts as an instrument for promoting (discouraging) pro-social (anti-social) behavior. We connect three streams of literature (nudging, social preferences, and social norms) to investigate the universality...

Is punishment of free riders driven by descriptive social norms of cooperation and punishment? We conduct experiments in which participants interact in a one-shot social dilemma with punishment. We study how punishment of free riders is influenced by behavior among members of a payoff-irrelevant...

This document presents the preliminary findings from the quantitative data generation and analysis conducted as part of the project "Financial decision-making, gender and social norms in Zambia". Using a series of specially designed behavioural experiments,we generated an extensive set of...

A popular empirical technique to measure norms uses coordination games to elicit what subjects in an experiment consider appropriate behavior in a given situation (Krupka and Weber, 2013). The Krupka-Weber method works under the assumption that subjects use their normative expectations to solve...

This book takes a stand against the narrowing focus of (German) jurisprudence on state law, rooted in the history of the territorially organised nation state. In the shadow of this tradition, state(-hood) law was only conceived of as state law. However, a gradual decoupling of state and law is...

Despite recent advances in reputation technologies, it is not clear how reputation systems can affect human cooperation in social networks. Although it is known that two of the major mechanisms in the evolution of cooperation are spatial selection and reputation-based reciprocity, theoretical...

There is now an extensive literature on "gift exchange" showing that when principals and agents can trade "gifts" (rewards that should not emerge in a competitive equilibrium), exchange becomes more efficient. However, it is not obvious how gift exchange should be organized if the principal's...

We examine two Pakistani programs to explore the role of deterrence as well as social and psychological factors in the tax compliance behavior of agents. In the first of these programs, the government began revealing income tax paid by every taxpayer in the country. The second program publicly...