Many people judge that it is permissible to harm one person in order to save many in some circumstances but not in others: it matters how the harm comes about. Researchers have used trolley problems to investigate this phenomenon, eliciting moral judgments or behavioral predictions about...

This paper reexamines key results from the measurement of opportunity freedom , or the extent to which a set of options offers a decision maker real opportunities to achieve. Three cases are investigated: no preferences, a single preference, and plural preferences. The three corresponding...

Since the recent financial crisis, regulators and the general public have focused on financial speculation as one of its potential causes. In addition to the roles played by rating agencies and complicated financial engineering, speculative short sales have been put into question. However,...

Recent years have seen a sharp increase in the use of subjective well-being data in environmental economics. This article discusses the conceptual underpinnings of using such data as a tool for preference elicitation and non-market valuation. Given the connection of those data to the notion of...

This paper uses data from global and Canadian surveys data to estimate the powerful linkages between social connections, their related social identities, and subjective well-being. Our explanatory variables include several measures of the extent and frequency of use of social networks, combined...

Collecting and analyzing panel data over the last four U.S. presidential elections, we study the drivers of self-reported happiness. We relate our empirical findings to existing models of elation, reference dependence, and belief formation. In addition to corroborating previous findings in the...

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...

Empirically, the commons are not as tragic as standard theory predicts. The predominant explanation for this finding is conditional cooperation. Yet many real life situations involve insiders, who are directly affected by a dilemma, and outsiders, who may be harmed if the insiders overcome the...

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...

We study how to promote compliance with rules that carry low penalties and are pervasive in all sorts of organizations. We have access to data on the users of all public libraries in Barcelona. In this setting, we test the effect of sending email messages with different contents. We find that...