The paper presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of a donor’s choice of the composition of unrestricted and in-kind/restricted transfers to a recipient and how this composition is adjusted in response to changes in the moral hazard behavior of the recipient. In-kind or restricted...

We conduct a field experiment to analyze the effect of deadline length on charitable giving. Subjects are invited to complete an online survey, with a donation going to charity if they do so. Participants are given either one week, one month or no deadline by which to respond. Donations are...

In this study, we explore the effect of peers and family on University attendance and graduation. We find that parental expectations and peer effects have a significant impact on the educational outcomes which operates through the interconnectedness between grades and aspirations during high...

Will generous return policies in auctions benefit bidders? We investigate this issue using second-price common-value auctions. Theoretically, we find that the bidding equilibrium is unique unless returns are free, in which case there exist multiple equilibria with different implications for...

We develop, and experimentally test, models of informal agreements. Agents are assumed to be honest but suffer costs of overcoming temptations. We extend two classical bargaining solutions -- split-the-difference and deal-me-out -- to this informal agreement setting. For each solution there are...

Charness and Dufwenberg (2006) find that promises increase cooperation and suggest that the behavior of subjects in their experiment is driven by guilt aversion. By modifying the procedures to include a double blind social distance protocol we test an alternative explanation that promise keeping...

Should one use words or money to foster trust of the other party if no means of enforcing trustworthiness are available? This paper reports an experiment studying the effectiveness of two types of mechanisms for promoting trust: a costly gift and a costless message as well as their mutual...

Previous research has suggested that communication and especially promises increase cooperation in laboratory experiments. This has been taken as evidence for internal motivations such as guilt aversion or preference for promise keeping. The original goal of this paper was to examine promises...

Groups, companies, and organizations identify themselves via symbols. Symbols have the potential to create group identity and at the same time create group boundaries, thus allowing for achieving the benefits of cooperation by ingroup members. We use a laboratory experiment to study the role of...

In this study, we examine the effectiveness of the individual-punishment mechanism in larger groups, comparing groups of four to groups of 40 participants. We find that the individual punishment mechanism is remarkably robust when the MPCR is held constant despite the coordination problems...