The behavioral relevance of non-binding default options is well established. While most research has focused on decision makers' responses to a given default, we argue that this individual decision making perspective is incomplete. Instead, a comprehensive understanding of the foundation of...

We compare inequality aversion in individuals and teams by means of both within- and between-subject experimental designs, and we investigate how teams aggregate individual preferences. We find that team decisions reveal less inequality aversion than individual initial proposals in team...

We study electoral competition among politicians who are heterogeneous both in competence and in how much they care about (what they perceive as) the public interest relative to the private rents from being in office. We show that politicians may have stronger incentives to behave...

We construct a model of redistributive politics where the central government is opportunistic and uses its discretion to make transfers to state governments on the basis of political considerations. These considerations are the alignment between the incumbent parties at the central and state...

Interest groups are introduced in a spatial model of electoral competition between two political parties. We show that, by coordinating voting behavior,these interest groups increase the winning set, which is defined as the set of policy platforms for the challenger that will defeat the...

Interest groups are introduced in a spatial model of electoral competition between two political parties. We show that the presence of these interest groups increases the winning set, which is the set of policy platforms for the challenger that will defeat the incumbent. Therefore interest...

We investigate the determinants of giving in a lab-in-the-field experiment with large stakes. Study participants in urban Mozambique play dictator games where their counterpart is the closest person to them outside their household. Dictators share more with counterparts when they have the option...

We provide experimental evidence of workers' ingratiation by opinion conformity and of managers' discrimination in favor of workers with whom they share similar opinions. In our Baseline, managers can observe both workers' performance at a task and opinions before assigning unequal payoffs. In...

We investigate the intrinsic motivation of individuals to report, and thereby sanction, fellow group members who lie for personal gain. We further explore the changes in lying and reporting behavior that result from giving individuals a say in who joins their group. We find that enough...

Existing experimental research on behavior in weakest-link games shows overwhelmingly the inability of people to coordinate on the efficient equilibrium, especially in larger groups. We hypothesize that people are able to coordinate on efficient outcomes, provided they have sufficient freedom to...