The recent literature suggests that people have social preferences with a self-serving bias. Our data analysis reveals that the stylized fact of declining cooperation in repeated public goods experiments results from this bias and adaptation.

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 the concealment and detection of tax evasion. We show that these socially inefficient efforts - as well as the frequency of tax...