Decision-makers are sometimes influenced by the way in which choice situations are presented to them or "framed." This can be seen as an important challenge to the social sciences, since strong and pervasive framing effects would make it difficult to study human behavior in a synthetic or...

We consider a set of agents who have to choose one alternative among a finite set of social alternatives. A final allocation is a pair given by the selected alternative and the group of its users. Agents have crowding preferences over allocations: between any pair of allocations with the same...

We conducted a laboratory study with a public goods game in which contributions are not submitted all at once but incrementally as coordinated in real time by a clock. Individuals press a button as soon as the clock equals their willingness to contribute. This public goods institution exploits...

Direct democracy with its use of referenda avoids the prototypical principal-agent problems of delegation in indirect democracies, especially since elected representatives are usually not committed by law to keep their promises. Sequential or more complex referenda may, however, result in an...

The literature on school choice assumes that families can submit a preference list over all the schools they want to be assigned to. However, in many real-life instances families are only allowed to submit a list containing a limited number of schools. Subjects incentives are drastically...

Affirmative-action policies bias tournament rules in order to provide equal opportunities to a group of competitors who have a disadvantage they cannot be held responsible for. Critics argue that they distort incentives, resulting in lower individual performance, and that the selected pool of...

We present an experimental study on the wasted resources associated with tax evasion. This waste arises from taxpayers and tax authorities, investing costly effort in concealment, respectively detect ion, of tax evasion. We show that (socially inefficient) efforts depend positively on the...