This paper studies how imposing norms on contribution behavior affects individuals' intrinsic motivation. We consider the church levy, which the Catholic Church in Germany collects as a charitable donation, despite the fact that the levy is legally a tax. We design a randomized field experiment...

Choosing between selfish and non-selfish behavior in real life is a repeated decision with varying time spans between repetitions. To learn more about the dynamics of altruistic behavior, we use repeated standard dictator experiments. The dynamics of prosocial behavior in these experiments...

This paper studies how organizational design affects moral outcomes. Subjects face the decision to either kill mice for money or to save mice. We compare a Baseline treatment where subjects are fully pivotal to a Diffused-Pivotality treatment where subjects simultaneously choose in groups of...

We study whether leaders influence the unethical conduct of followers. To avoid selection issues present in natural environments, we use a laboratory experiment in which we form groups and assign leadership roles at random. We study an environment in which groups compete, with dishonest behavior...

We explore the role of cheap excuses in product choice. If a product improves upon one ethically relevant dimension, agents may care less about other, completely independent ethical facets of the product. This ‘static moral self-licensing' would extend the logic of the well studied moral...

This paper provides controlled experimental evidence that striving for pleasures of skill can have negative moral consequences and causally reduce moral values. Subjects perform an IQ-test. They know that each correctly solved question increases the likelihood of moral transgression. In terms of...

We conduct a laboratory experiment to shed light on the cognitive limitations that may affect the way decision makers respond to changes in their economic environment. The subjects solve a tracking problem: they estimate the probability of a binary event, which changes stochastically. The...

We develop an economic theory of tolerance where lifestyles and traits are invested with symbolic value by people. Value systems are endogenous and taught by parents to their children. In conjunction with actual behavior, value systems determine the esteem enjoyed by individuals. Intolerant...

We propose a technique for assessing robustness of behavioral measures and treatment effects to experimenter demand effects. The premise is that by deliberately inducing demand in a structured way we can measure its influence and construct plausible bounds on demand-free behavior. We provide...