The widespread use of markets leads to unprecedented material well-being in many societies. We study whether market interaction, as a side effect, erodes moral values. An encompassing understanding of the virtues and vices of markets, including their possible impact on moral values, is necessary...

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...

The probability triangle (also called the Marschak-Machina triangle) allows for compact and intuitive depictions of risk preferences. Here, we develop an analogous tool for choice under uncertainty – the ambiguity triangle – and show that indifference curves in this triangle capture...

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...

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...

There is vast heterogeneity in the human willingness to weigh others’ interests in decision making. This heterogeneity concerns the motivational intricacies as well as the strength of other-regarding behaviors, and raises the question how one can parsimoniously model and characterize...