An effective way to foster cooperation is to monitor behaviour and sanction freeriding. Yet, previous studies have shown that cooperation quickly declines when sanctioning mechanisms are removed. We test if explicitly expressing trust in players' capability to maintain cooperation after the...

We introduce a novel concept, group image concerns, showing that individuals change their behavior and are willing to incur personal costs to cultivate a positive image of their groups. We develop an experimental method to identify and quantify group image concerns, and conduct a series of...

A stream of research examining the effect of punishment on conformity indicates that punishment can backfire and lead to suboptimal social outcomes. We examine whether this effect is due to a lack of perceived legitimacy of rule enforcement, enabling agents to justify selfish behavior. We...

We investigate the relationship between political attitudes and prosociality in a survey of a representative sample of the U.S. population during the first summer of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that an experimental measure of prosociality correlates positively with adherence to protective...

I analyze the assignment mechanisms used by the political parties in the US Senate to match their members to legislative committees from a matching theory perspective: one-sided, many-to-many matching with existing tenants. Understanding the data-generating process through detailed analysis of...

This paper studies a large majority election with voters who have heterogeneous, private preferences and exogenous private signals. We show that a Bayesian persuader can implement any state-contingent outcome in some equilibrium by providing additional information. In this setting, without the...