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...

Duverger (1954) noted that changes in electoral systems will have two types of effects: mechanical effects, and reactions of political agents in anticipation of these, which he referred to as psychological effects. It is complicated to empirically separate the two effects since these occur...

The mathematical framework of psychological game theory is useful for describing many forms of motivation where preferences depend directly on own or others' beliefs. It allows for incorporating, e.g., emotions, reciprocity, image concerns, and self-esteem in economic analysis. We explain how...

We propose a model of optimal decision making subject to a memory constraint. The constraint is a limit on the complexity of memory measured using Shannon’s mutual information, as in models of rational inattention; but our theory differs from that of Sims (2003) in not assuming costless memory...

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...

We explore the relation between social political identity and prosociality. We first construct a theoretical model to generate predictions for the behavior of players in an ultimatum game who are influenced by social political identity. Then we use a novel subject pool-registered members of...

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...

Recent literature has shown that lying behavior in the laboratory can well be explained by a combination of lying costs and reputation concerns. We extend the literature on lying behavior to strategic interactions. As reciprocal behavior is important in many interactions, we study a theoretical...

This paper combines several large-scale surveys with different identification strategies to shed new light on the determinants of cooperative behavior. We provide evidence indicating that the well-being maximizing level of trust is above the income maximizing level. Higher trust is also linked...

We present controlled experimental evidence on how rent extraction by an administrator affects giving to non-profit associations. Holding the price of giving constant, we compare contributions between two conditions: a rent extraction condition, in which an administrator can expropriate a part...