The development and use of long-lived public goods involves more than one demographic generation, leaving the classic literature on voluntary provisions partially unfit to explain complex phenomena such as welfare systems, climate policies and major infrastructure projects. This paper proposes a...

We investigate strategic choices of individuals working for social cooperatives in Italy. Specifically, a 2-players Prisoner’s Dilemma is administered as an attachment to a nationwide survey of nonprofit organizations. We experimentally manipulate social proximity of the participants and...

Group membership increases cooperation in social dilemma games, altruistic donation in dictator games, and fair offers in ultimatum games. While the empirical study of group action has grown rapidly over the years, there is little agreement at the theoretical level on exactly why and how group...

Nudge policies are typically justified from paternalistic premises: nudges are acceptable if they benefit the individuals who are nudged. A tacit assumption behind this strategy is that the biases of decision that choice architects attempt to eliminate generate costs that are paid mainly by the...

This paper extends choice theory by allowing for the interaction between cognitive costs and social norms. We experimentally investigate the role of imitation when participants face a task which is costly in cognitive terms. We identify two main reasons for imitative behavior. First, individuals...

We experimentally investigate social effects in a principal-agent setting with incomplete contracts. The strategic interaction scheme is based on the Investment Game (Berg et al., 1995). In our setting four trustees and one trustor are interacting and the access to choices of peers in the group...

Theoretical and empirical body of research have exposed the powerful role of experiencing regret in guiding choice behavior. In this paper, we examined the impact of experienced regret and rejoicing induced by feedback provided on a risk decision prior to a two-period intertemporal choice. To...

Although it is now recognized that norms play an important role in many economic decisions, compliance with conventions is generally considered to be driven by rational self-interest only. We report instead experimental data showing that (1) ‘external’ norms of fairness sustain social...

The bias generated by the subjective perception of scarcity on the consumer's choice is investigated using two separated experiments. The first experiment is aimed to define the prevailing preferences towards a set of commodities, the second experiment checked the effects produced by the...