A growing economic literature stresses the importance of relative comparisons, e.g., for savings and consumption or happiness. In this literature it is usually assumed that reference standards against which people compare themselves are exogenously given. In contrast, findings from social...

This paper studies how organizational design affects moral outcomes. Subjects face the decision to either kill mice for money or to save mice. We compare a Baseline treatment where subjects are fully pivotal to a Diffused-Pivotality treatment where subjects simultaneously choose in groups of...

Choosing what is morally right can be based on the consequences (ends) resulting from the decision - the Consequentialist view - or on the conformity of the means involved with some overarching notion of duty - the Deontological view. Using a series of experiments, we investigate the overall...

Laboratory experiments are a widely used methodology for advancing causal knowledge in the physical and life sciences. With the exception of psychology, the adoption of laboratory experiments has been much slower in the social sciences, although during the last two decades, the use of lab...

How do firms motivate their employees to be productive? The conventional wisdom is that workers respond to monetary incentives - "Pay them more and they will work harder." However, a large and growing body of empirical evidence from laboratory and field experiments, surveys, and observational...