We examine the role of cooperative preferences, beliefs, and punishments to uncover potential cross … beliefs explain cooperation – we show that cooperation is mostly driven by differences in beliefs rather than cooperative … subject pools and highlights the central role of beliefs in explaining differences in voluntary cooperation within and across …

highly underestimate agents’ reciprocity and, thereby, offer wages that are much lower than the profit-maximizing level. This … bias has a high social cost: if principals had correct beliefs and thus offered the profit-maximizing wage, efficiency … about the relevance of reciprocity in the workplace and open new questions about belief formation in prosocial contexts. …

We provide a test of the role of social preferences and beliefs in voluntary cooperation and its decline. We elicit … individuals' cooperation preferences in one experiment and use them as well as subjects' elicited beliefs to explain contributions … contribute less than others, rather than by their changing beliefs of others' contribution over time. Universal free riding is …

posterior beliefs about tax evasion strengthen these results, and reveal moreover that information about top income tax evasion … erodes social trust, reinforces beliefs that wealth accumulation only occurs at others' expense, and increases beliefs that a …