Affirmative action rules are often implemented to promote women on labor markets. Little is known, however, about how and whether such rules emerge endogenously in groups of potentially affected subjects. We experimentally investigate whether subjects vote for affirmative action rules, against,...

We examine the effects of social preferences and beliefs about the social preferences of others in a simple leader-follower voluntary contributions game. We find that groups perform best when led by those who are reciprocally oriented. Part of the effect can be explained by a false consensus...

We report an experiment comparing sequential and simultaneous contributions to a public good in a quasi-linear two-person setting. In one parameterization we find that overall provision is lower under sequential than simultaneous contributions, as predicted, but the distribution of contributions...

We examine the characteristics of effective leaders in a simple leader-follower voluntary contributions game. We focus on two factors: the individual's cooperativeness and the individual's beliefs about the cooperativeness of others. We find that groups perform best when led by those who are...

We compare social preference and social norm based explanations for peer effects in a three-person gift-exchange game experiment. In the experiment a principal pays a wage to each of two agents, who then make effort choices sequentially. In our baseline treatment we observe that the second...

We compare experimentally the revealed distributional preferences of individuals and teams in allocation tasks. We find that teams are significantly more benevolent than individuals in the domain of disadvantageous inequality while the benevolence in the domain of advantageous inequality is...

We study experimentally the protection of property in five widely distinct countries-Austria, Mexico, Mongolia, South Korea and the United States. Our main results are that the security of property varies with experimental institutions, and that our subject pools exhibit significantly different...

We investigate the effects of information feedback in rent-seeking games with two different contest structures. In the deterministic contest a contestant receives a share of the rent equal to her share of rent-seeking expenditures, while in the stochastic contest a contestant wins the entire...

We investigate the role of information feedback in rent-seeking games with two different contest structures. In the stochastic contest a contestant wins the entire rent with probability equal to her share of rent-seeking expenditures; in the deterministic contest she receives a share of the rent...

Ostracism, or exclusion by peers, has been practiced since ancient times as a severe form of punishment against transgressors of laws or social norms. The purpose of this paper is to offer a comprehensive analysis on how ostracism affects behavior and the functioning of a social group. We...