Departures from self-interest in economic experiments have recently inspired models of “social preferencesâ€. We design a range of simple experimental games that test these theories more directly than existing experiments. Our experiments show that subjects are more concerned with...

How robust are social preferences to variations in the environment in which a decision is made? By varying the elicitation method and default choice in the `moral wiggle-room' game of Dana, Weber, and Kuang (2007), I examine the robustness and nature of the pattern of information avoidance in...

Some current utility models presume that people are concerned with their relative standing in a reference group. If this is true, do certain types care more about this than others? Using simple binary decisions and self-reported happiness, we investigate both the prevalence of “difference...

We examine experimentally the impact of communication on trust and cooperation. Our design admits observation of promises, lies, and beliefs. The evidence is consistent with people striving to live up to others’ expectations in order to avoid guilt, as can be modeled using psychological...

Can incentives be effective when trying to encourage the development of good habits? We investigate the effect of paying people a non-trivial amount of money to attend an exercise facility a number of times during a one-month period. In two separate studies, we find that doing so leads to a...

This paper estimates social effects of incentivizing people in teams. In two fieldexperiments featuring exogenous team formation and opportunities for repeated socialinteractions, we find large team effects that operate through social channels. The teamcompensation system induced agents to...

We tested the effects of various of policy rules on retailer behavior in laboratory experiments conducted at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. Our experimental design models the multifaceted contemporary market for consumer computer products and is quite complex, but we found that participants can...

Traffic congestion is a substantial time cost for many urban commuters. This paper studies the response of subjects in an experimental setting in which subjects choose between a short direct route that becomes increasingly congested as more people travel on it and a more indirect route that does...

Considerable experimental evidence suggests that non-pecuniary motives must be addressed when modeling behavior in economic contexts. Recent models of non-pecuniary motives can be classified as either altruism-based, equity-based, or reciprocity-based. We estimate and compare leading approaches...