A burgeoning literature in economics has started examining the role of social norms in explaining economic behavior. Surprisingly, the vast majority of this literature has studied social norms in asocial decision settings, where individuals are observed to act in isolation from each other. In...

We compare social preference and social norm based explanations for peer effects in a three-person gift-exchange game experiment. In the experiment a principal pays a wage to each of two agents, who then make effort choices sequentially. In our baseline treatment we observe that the second...

We investigate the impact of wage comparisons for worker productivity. We present three studies which all use three-person gift-exchange experiments. Consistent with Akerlof and Yellen's (1990) fair wage-effort hypothesis we find that disadvantageous wage discrimination leads to lower efforts...

Experimental research has shown that ordinary people often perform remarkably well in solving coordination games that involve no conflicts of interest. While most experiments in the past studied such coordination games among socially distant anonymous players, here we study behaviour in a set of...

We introduce "group cohesion" to study the economic relevance of social relationships in team production. We operationalize measurement of group cohesion, adapting the "oneness scale" from psychology. A series of experiments, including a pre-registered replication, reveals strong positive...

We investigate the effects of pay comparison information (i.e. information about what co-workers earn) and effort comparison information (information about how co-workers perform) in experimental firms composed of one employer and two employees. Exposure to pay comparison information in...

This paper investigates how social comparison information about referent others (i.e. learning what similar others do and how they are treated) affects reciprocal relationships. Using a three-person gift-exchange game we study how employees' reciprocity towards an employer is affected by...

We compare social preference and social norm based explanations for peer effects in a threeperson gift-exchange game experiment. In the experiment a principal pays a wage to each of two agents, who then make effort choices sequentially. We find that both agents supply more effort in response to...

In the last thirty years economists and other social scientists investigated people's normative views on principles of distributive justice. Here we study people's normative views in social dilemmas, which underlie many situations of economic and social significance. Using insights from moral...