Psychological game theory can help provide a rational choice explanation of framing effects; frames influence beliefs, beliefs influence motivations. We explain this theoretically, and explore the empirical relevance experimentally. In a 2×2 design of one-shot public good games we show that...

Psychological game theory can provide rational-choice-based framing effects; frames influence beliefs, beliefs influence motivations. We explain this theoretically and explore empirical relevance experimentally. In a 2x2 design of one-shot public good games we show that frames affect subject’s...

Discrimination is an ubiquitous phenomenon in many societies, but little is known about its origins in childhood. In a framed field experiment, we let 142 three to six-year old preschool children allocate a fixed endowment between an in-group and an out-group receiver in two domains (gender and...

We present experimental evidence from a bilingual city in Northern Italy on whether thelanguage spoken by a partner in a prisoner’s dilemma game affects behavior and leadsto discrimination. Running a framed field experiment with 828 six- to eleven-year oldprimary school children in the city of...

We measure time preferences in a sample of 561 children aged seven to eleven years. Using awithin-subject design we compare the behavior of our subjects in two distinct experimentaltasks: a standard choice list with multiple decisions and a simpler time-investment-exerciserequiring one decision...

According to Chen’s (2013) linguistic-savings hypothesis, languages which grammatically separate the future and the present (like English or Italian) induce less future-oriented behavior than languages in which speakers can refer to the future by using present tense (like German). We...

We study with a sample of 1,070 primary school children, aged seven to eleven years,how altruism in a donation experiment is related to children’s risk attitudes and intertemporalchoices. Examining such a relationship is motivated by theories of reciprocalaltruism that provide a cornerstone to...

We consider an expanded notion of social norms that renders them belief-dependent and partial, formulate a series of related testable predictions, and design an experiment based on a variant of the dictator game that tests for empirical relevance. Main results: Normative beliefs influence...

Many important intertemporal decisions, such as investments of firms or households, are made by groups rather than individuals. Little is known what happens to such collective decisions when group members have different incentives for waiting, because the economics literature on group decision...

We study gender differences in relation to performance and sabotage in competitions. While we find no systematic gender differences in performance in the real effort task, we observe a strong gender gap in sabotage choices in our experiment. This gap is rooted in the uncertainty about the...