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 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...

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...

Theoretical and empirical studies have generally weighed the effect of peer punishment and pool punishment for sanctioning free riders separately. However, these sanctioning mechanisms often pose a puzzling tradeoff between efficiency and stability in detecting and punishing free riders. Here,...

Empirical literature on moral hazard focuses exclusively on the direct impact of asymmetric information on market outcomes, thus ignoring possible repercussions. We present a field experiment in which we consider a phenomenon that we call second-degree moral hazard - the tendency of the supply...

Despite the accumulation of research on indirect reciprocity over the past 30 years and the publication of over 100,000 related papers, there are still many issues to be addressed. Here, we look back on the research that has been done on indirect reciprocity and identify the issues that have...

Credence goods markets are prone to fraudulent behavior and market inefficiencies due to informational asymmetries between sellers and customers. We examine experimentally the effects of diagnostic uncertainty and insurance coverage on the information acquisition and provision decisions by...

Indirect reciprocity is one of the major mechanisms driving the evolution of cooperation in human societies. There are two types of indirect reciprocity: upstream and downstream reciprocity. Cooperation in downstream reciprocity follows the pattern ‘You helped someone, and I will help you’,...

Paying it forward" is a behavior in which people help someone else because they were helped in the past. Although experimental evidence exists that indicates that real human beings often "pay-it-forward" even in the face of free-rider risks, the theoretical basis for the evolution of this...