Our forthcoming book, Welfare Theory, Public Action and Ethical Values challenges the belief that, until modern welfare economics introduced issues such as justice, freedom and equality, economists adopted what Amartya Sen called “welfarism.” This is the belief that the welfare of society...

In a series of experiments, we test the relative efficiency of persuasion and commitment schemes to increase and sustain contribution levels in a Voluntary Contribution Game. The design allows to compare a baseline consisting of a repeated public good game to, respectively, four manipulation...

The weight assigned to public information in Keynesian beauty contest depends on the signal precision and on the degree of strategic complementarities. This experimental study shows that the response of subjects to changes in the signal precision and in the degree of strategic complementarities...

The paper investigates whether the tertiarisation and the rapid urbanisation faced by developing countries favour agglomeration economies. Focusing on Ecuadorian cantons, a productivity equation is estimated using the GMM model with instruments controlling for endogeneity. The varying impact of...

With Big Data, decisions made by machine learning algorithms depend on training data generated by many individuals. In an experiment, we identify the effect of varying individual responsibility for moral choices of an artificially intelligent algorithm. Across treatments, we manipulated the...

Humans shape the behavior of artificially intelligent algorithms. One mechanism is the training these systems receive through the passive observation of human behavior and the data we constantly generate. In a laboratory experiment with a sequence of dictator games, we let participants’...

This paper investigates the effects of automation and offshoring on the dynamics of the occupational distribution of employment with a focus on Western Europe between 2000 and 2016. I use a general equilibrium model with three regions, three types of workers, ICT capital, trade in final goods...

If individuals tend to behave like their peers, is it because of conformity, that is, the preference of people to align behavior with the behavior of their peers; homophily, that is, the tendency of people to bond with similar others; or both? We address this question in the context of an...

We compare disagreement in expectations and the frequency of forecast revisions among five categories of agents: households, firms, professional forecasters, policymakers and participants to laboratory experiments. We provide evidence of disagreement among all categories of agents. There is...

Pro-social individuals face a trade-off between their monetary and moral motives. Hence, they may be tempted to exploit the uncertainty in their decision environment in order to reconcile this trade-off. In this paper, we investigate whether individuals with belief-dependent preferences avoid...