Since the sinking of the Titanic, there has been a widespread belief that the social norm of ‘women and children first’ gives women a survival advantage over men in maritime disasters, and that captains and crew give priority to passengers. We analyze a database of 18 maritime disasters...

We study risk taking on behalf of others, both with and without potential losses. A large-scale incentivized experiment is conducted with subjects randomly drawn from the Danish population. On average, decision makers take the same risks for other people as for themselves when losses are...

We study risk taking on behalf of others in an experiment on a large random sample. The decision makers in our experiment are facing high-powered incentives to increase the risk on behalf of others through hedged compensation contracts or with tournament incentives. Compared to a baseline...

We conduct a laboratory experiment where third-party spectators can redistribute resources between two agents, thereby offsetting the consequences of controllable and uncontrollable luck. Some spectators go to the limits and equalize all or no inequalities, but many follow an interior allocation...

Recent experimental studies suggest that risk aversion is negatively related to cognitive ability. In this paper we report evidence that this relation might be spurious. We recruit a large subject pool drawn from the general Danish population for our experiment. By presenting subjects with...

Bounded rationality provides a fundamental economic explanation for non-rational modes of behavior. These non-rational modes underlie both the erratic perturbations of entrepreneurship and the systematic waves of diffusion they initiate which in turn guarantee that the economy operates out of...

We derive a family of probabilistic choice models including the multinomial logit model, from a microeconomic model in which the decision maker has to make some effort in order to avoid mistakes when implementing any desired outcome. The disutility of this effort enters the decision maker's goal...

This paper analyzes the interplay between social norms and economic incentives in the context of work decision in the modern welfare state. We assume that to live off one's own work is a social norm, and that the larger the population fraction adhering to this norm, the more intensely it is felt...

We derive a family of probabilistic choice models including the multinomial logit model, from a microeconomic model in which the decision maker has to make some effort in order to avoid mistakes when implementing any desired outcome. The disutility of this effort enters the decision maker's goal...