In this paper, we analyze how kinship among family members affects intergenerational cooperation in a public good game. 165 individuals from 55 families, comprising three generations (youths, parents, and grandparents), play a public good game in three different treatments: one in which three...

This study presents descriptive and causal evidence on the role of social environment for the formation of prosociality. In a first step, we show that socio-economic status (SES) as well as the intensity of mother-child interaction and mothers’ prosocial attitudes are systematically related to...

We test whether humans are intuitively inclined to cooperate with or punish strangers using a natural field experiment. We exogenously vary the time available to help a stranger in an everyday situation. Our findings suggest that subjects intuitively tend to help but behave more selfishly as...

Social preferences have been shown to be an important determinant of economic decision making for many adults. We present a large-scale experiment with 883 children and adolescents, aged eight to seventeen years. Participants make decisions in eight simple, one-shot allocation tasks, allowing us...

We explore network effects on generosity for different network dimensions. To this end we elicit multiple network dimensions (friendship, social support, economic exchange, etc.) in a rural village in the Southern hemisphere and measure generosity with a sequence of dictator games conducted in...

The memory people have of their past behavior is one of the main sources of information about themselves. To study whether people retrieve their memory self-servingly in social encounters, we designed an experiment in which participants play binary dictator games and then have to recall the...

Preferences - concerning time, risk and social interactions - systematically shape human behavior, and contribute to differential economic and social outcomes between the genders. Here, we present a global investigation of gender differences in six fundamental preferences. Our data consist of...

We document individual willingness to fight climate change and its behavioral determinants in a large representative sample of US adults. Willingness to fight climate change - as measured through an incentivized donation decision - is highly heterogeneous across the population. Individual...

The impact of workers' non-pecuniary motivation on their productivity is a fundamental issue in labor economics. Previous studies indicate that prosocially motivated workers may perform better when assigned to jobs having socially desirable implications - even if effort is non contractible and...

SMS information campaigns are increasingly used for policy. We conduct a field experiment to study information sharing through mobile phone messages. Subjects are rural households in Mozambique who have access to mobile money. In the baseline intervention, subjects receive an SMS containing...