A taboo is an "unthinkable" action, that is, even the thought of violating it triggers social punishment. Taboos are the social "thought police," discouraging individuals from considering certain type of actions. We consider a simple model in which taboos are part of the definition of one's...

This paper demonstrates the effects of ethnic and religious diversity on the quality of public spaces. Its identification strategy relies on the exogeneity of public housing allocations in France, and thereby eliminates the bias from endogenous sorting. The paper uses micro evidence of social...

This Paper analyses an overlapping generation model of public good provision under repeated voting. The public good is financed through age-dependent taxation that distorts human capital investment. Taxes redistribute income both across different skill groups and across generations. We contrast...

We analyze the effect of a large group on an impure public goods model with lotteries. We show that as populations get large, and with selfish preferences, the level of contributions converges to the one given by voluntary contributions. With altruistic preferences (of the warm glow type), the...

This Paper deals with collective decision making within a group of independent jurisdictions. The right to choose the public policy is delegated from the central authority of one of the jurisdictions through a bidding procedure among the group members. We identify the following trade-off:...

This paper analyzes the effects of network positions and individual risk attitudes on individuals' strategic decisions in an experiment where actions are strategic substitutes. The game theoretic basis for our experiment is the model of Bramoullé and Kranton (2007). In particular, we are...

In this Paper we show that a simple model of fairness preferences explains major experimental regularities of common pool resource (CPR) experiments. The evidence indicates that in standard CPR games without communication and without sanctioning possibilities inefficient excess appropriation is...

This study reports data from a field experiment that was conducted to investigate the relevance of gift-exchange for charitable giving. Roughly 10,000 solicitation letters were sent to potential donors in the experiment. One third of the letters contained no gift, one third contained a small...

We build a theory of prosocial behaviour that combines heterogeneity in individual altruism and greed with concerns for social reputation or self-respect. The presence of rewards or punishments creates doubt as to the true motive for which good deeds are performed, and this ‘overjustification...

This paper analyzes how private decisions and public policies are shaped by personal and societal preferences (values), material or other explicit incentives (laws) and social sanctions or rewards (norms). It first examines how honor, stigma and social norms arise from individuals’ behaviors...