Many real-world mechanisms are “noisy” or “fuzzy”, that is the institutions in place to implement them operate with non-negligible degrees of imprecision and error. This observation raises the more general question of whether mechanisms that work in theory are also robust to more...

People often act out of a desire to be responsible for good and not for bad events. Similarly, people frequently reward and punish other people if they perceive them to be responsible for the implementation of events that they like or dislike. When the implementation of an event depends on the...

Is the willingness to make trades influenced by how the total gains from trade are split between the trading partners? We present results from a bilateral trade game (n = 128) where all participants were price-takers and trading pairs faced one of three exogenously imposed trading prices. The...

We propose and axiomatically characterize a family of welfare criteria that prioritize individuals making larger sacrifices. By combining efficiency with a concern for equality of sacrifice, our criteria avoid serious shortcomings of utilitarianism. We illustrate our results within the...

We show that perceptions of relative rank in the wealth distribution shape individuals’ willingness to take risks. Using a representative large-scale survey, we manipulate perceptions of relative standing by randomly varying response categories when asking respondents about their wealth level....

Using survey data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) from 2010 to 2018, this paper analyzes the relationship between income inequality, group-specific income redistribution, and subjective well-being among China’s urban, rural, and migrant populations. Using narrowly defined reference...

Empirical welfare analyses often impose stringent parametric assumptions on individuals’ preferences and neglect unobserved preference heterogeneity. In this paper, we develop a framework to conduct individual and social welfare analysis for discrete choice that does not suffer from these...

This paper reconsiders evidence from experimental common pool resource games from the perspective of a model of payoff sampling. Despite being parameter-free, the model is able to replicate some striking features of the data, including single-peaked frequency distributions, the persistent use of...

The Type Indeterminacy model is a theoretical framework that uses some elements of quantum formalism to model the constructive preference perspective suggested by Kahneman and Tversky. In a dynamic decision context, type indeterminacy induces a game with multiple selves associated with a state...

Two deviations of alternating-offer bargaining behavior from economic theory are observed together, yet have been studied separately. Players who could secure themselves a large surplus share if bargainers were purely self-interested incompletely exploit their advantage. Delay in agreement...