The emergence of competition is a defining aspect of human nature and characterizes many important social environments. However, its relationship with how social groups are formed has received little attention. We design an experiment to analyze how individuals' willingness to compete is...

We provide a critique of the standard methodology which bases welfare comparisons between households on deflating household income and consumption by an equivalence scale. We argue that this leads to support for tax/transfer policies that significantly disadvantage low to middle in-come...

Expert advice is often biased in ways that benefit the advisor. We demonstrate how self-deception helps advisors be biased while preserving their self-image as ethical and identify limits to advisors' ability to self-deceive. In experiments where advisors recommend one of two investments to a...

Many modern organisations collect data on individuals’ personality traits as part of their human resource selection processes. We test experimentally whether revealing information on personality data impacts on pro-social behaviour as measured in a one-shot modified dictator game and a public...

The quasi-exogenous division of the French regions Alsace and Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian War allows us to provide evidence about group identity formation within historically homogeneous regions. Using several measures of stated and revealed preferences spanning over half a century, we...

The quasi-exogenous division of the French regions Alsace and Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian War allows us to provide evidence about group identity formation within historically homogeneous regions. We use several measures of stated and revealed preferences at the municipal-level in a...

We study response behavior in surveys and show how the explanatory power of self-reports can be improved. First, we develop a choice model of survey response behavior under the assumption that the respondent has imperfect self-knowledge about her individual characteristics. In panel data, the...

We conduct a large-scale survey experiment in nine European countries to study how priming a major crisis (COVID-19), common economic interests, and a shared identity influences altruism, reciprocity and trust of EU citizens. We find that priming the COVID-19 pandemic increases altruism and...

We use the trust and the dictator games to explore the effects of religious identity on trust, trustworthiness, prosociality, and conditional reciprocity within a beliefs-based model. We provide a novel and rigorous theoretical model to derive the relevant predictions, which are then tested in...

Women are significantly underrepresented in the technology sector. We design a field experiment to identify statistical discrimination in job applicant assessments and test treatments to help improve hiring of the best applicants. In our experiment, we measure the programming skills of job...