How do exogenous increases in resources to a government affect its expenditure decisions? Economic theory typically predicts that a lump-sum grant will have the same impact on government expenditures as an increase in income. However, empirical studies consistently find that government spending...

This paper reports three experiments with triadic or dyadic designs. The experiments include the moonlighting game in which first-mover actions can elicit positively or negatively reciprocal reactions from second movers. First movers can be motivated by trust in positive reciprocity or fear of...

Departures from quot;economic manquot; behavior in many games in which fairness is a salient characteristic are now well documented in the experimental economics literature. These data have inspired development of new models of social preferences incorporating inequality aversion and...

This paper develops a nonparametric theory of preferences over one's own and others' monetary payoffs. We introduce more altruistic than (MAT), a partial ordering over preferences, and interpret it with known parametric models. We also introduce and illustrate more generous than (MGT),a partial...

This paper addresses four stylized facts that summarize data from experimental studies of voluntary contributions to provision of public goods. Theoretical propositions and testable hypotheses for voluntary contributions are derived from two models of social preferences, the inequity aversion...

Theories of decision under risk that assume decreasing marginal utility of money have been critiqued with concavity calibration arguments. Since that critique uses varying payoffs and fixed probabilities, it cannot have implications for calibration of nonlinear probability transformation, which...

Departures from "economic man" behavior in many games in which fairness is a salient characteristic are now well documented in the experimental economics literature. These data have inspired development of models of social preferences that assume agents have preferences for equity and efficiency...

A growing literature reports the conclusions that: (a) expected utility theory does not provide a plausible theory of risk aversion for both small-stakes and large-stakes gambles; and (b) this decision theory should be replaced with an alternative theory characterized by loss aversion. This...

We extend the basic model of spatial competition in two directions. First, political parties and voters do not have complete information but behave adaptively. Political parties use polls to search for policy platforms that maximize the probability of winning an election and the voting decision...

Weber, Shafir, and Blais (2004) advocate use of the coefficient of variation (CV) as a measure of risk sensitivity and apply CV in a meta-analysis of data for risky choices by humans and animals. We critically re-examine the CV measure as either a normative or descriptive criterion for decision...