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...

Experimental social scientists working at research-intensive institutions deal inevitably with subjects who have most likely participated in previous experiments. It is an important methodological question to know whether participants that have acquired a high level of lab-sophistication show...

How should we interpret the World Values Survey (WVS) trust question? We conduct an experiment in India, a low trust country, to correlate the WVS trust question with trust decisions in an incentivized Trust Game. Evidence supports findings from one strand of the fractured literature – the WVS...

Asset market bubbles and crashes are a major source of economic instability and inefficiency. Sometimes ascribed to animal spirits or irrational exuberance, their source remains imperfectly understood. Experimental methods can isolate systematic deviations from an asset's fundamental value in a...

Trust and trustworthiness are important components of social capital and much attention has been devoted to their correct evaluation. In this paper, we argue that individuals' trust and trustworthiness are strongly dependent on the level of trust and trustworthiness of the social group in which...

We studied how communication media affect trust game play. Three popular media were considered: traditional face-to-face, Facebook groups, and anonymous online chat. We considered post-communication changes in players' expectations and preferences, and further analyzed the contents of group...

This study investigates the effects of unfair enforcement of institutional rules on public good contributions, personal and social norms, and trust. In a preregistered online experiment (n = 1,038), we find that biased institutions reduce rule compliance compared to fair institutions. However,...

Typically, laboratory experiments suffer from homogeneous subject pools and self-selectionbiases. The usefulness of survey data is limited by measurement error and by thequestionability of their behavioral relevance. Here we present a method integrating interactiveexperiments and representative...

We combined a natural experiment (the occurrence of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020) with the tools of laboratory experiments to study whether and how an unprecedented shock on social interactions (the introduction and abrogation of a nationwide lockdown) affected the evolution of individuals'...

We study how upward communication – from workers to managers – about individual efforts affects the effectiveness of gift exchange as a contract-enforcement device for work teams. Our findings suggest that the use of such self-assessments can be detrimental to workers' performance. In the...