We examine the degree of trust and trustworthiness in an experimental trust game with 662 participants from six different age groups, ranging from 8-year-olds to retired persons. Although both trust and trustworthiness have been identified as fundamental pillars for efficient economic...

This paper reports a surprising finding from an experiment on giving to welfare recipients. The experiment tests how offers of money in n-donor dictator games are affected by 1) donors' humanitarian and egalitarian values and 2) direct information about the recipients' work-preferences. People...

Recent policy initiatives offer cash payments to children (and often their families) to induce better health and educational choices. These policies implicitly assume that children are especially impatient (i.e., have high discount rates); however, little is known about the nature of children's...

This paper presents new evidence on the distribution of risk attitudes in the population, using a novel set of survey questions and a representative sample of roughly 22,000 individuals living in Germany. Using a question that asks about willingness to take risks in general, on an 11-point...

In November 2001, 5,558 readers of the German weekly Die Zeit participated in a three-person ultimatum experiment involving a proposer X, a responder Y, and a dummy Z (Guth and van Damme, 1998). A proposal is a vector (x,y,z) with x + y + z = DM 1,200, and x in {0, 200, 400, 600, 800, 1000}, and...

A field study of altruistic behaviour is presented using a modification of the dictator game in a large random sample survey in the Netherlands (n=1,964). In line with laboratory experiments, only 5.7% donated money. In line with other survey research on giving, generosity increased with age,...

This study presents an overview of modern field experiments and their usage in economics. Our discussion focuses on three distinct periods of field experimentation that have influenced the economics literature. The first might well be thought of as the dawn of ""field"" experimentation: the work...

We overview the use of field experiments in labor economics. We showcase studies that highlight the central advantages of this methodology, which include: (i) using economic theory to design the null and alternative hypotheses; (ii) engineering exogenous variation in real world economic...