This paper characterizes a novel class of welfare criteria for settings with endogenous population. The core innovation is to treat parents’ fertility preferences as ethically relevant, deferring to them on the quality--quantity trade-off under conditions of equality. The resulting family of...

We provide evidence in line with the illusion of moral superiority, a phenomenon that individuals perceive themselves to be more morally motivated than others. We analyze survey data collected during the 2022/23 energy crisis in Germany to investigate individuals' and others' motivations to...

We present a self- and social-signaling model formalizing findings in political psychology that moral and political judgments stem primarily from intuition and emotion, while reasoning serves to rationalize these intuitions to maintain an image of impartiality. In social interactions, agents’...

Within a general equilibrium model, this paper identifies a novel animal welfare externality that occurs if the private animal friendliness in a market economy falls short of the social animal friendliness used by the social planner when determining the efficient allocation. The animal welfare...

We examine utilitarian criteria for evaluating profiles of wellbeing among infinitely many individuals. Motivated by the non-existence of a natural 1-to-1 correspondence between people when alternatives have different population structures, with a different number of people in each generation,...

Do groups and individuals behave differently in dictator games with varying deservingness of the recipient? Does the involvement in group-decision making affect the decisions of group members in subsequent individual decisions? We address these questions using a controlled dictator-game...

We document individual willingness to fight climate change and its behavioral determinants in a large representative sample of US adults. Willingness to fight climate change – as measured through an incentivized donation decision – is highly heterogeneous across the population. Individual...

We investigate how moral considerations, background conditions and risk can trigger resistance to implement trading institutions. We provide survey results on moral opposition to trade on several goods and services like body organs, sex services, surrogate mothers, trade with developing nations,...

An extensive literature documents that people are willing to sacrifice personal material gain to adhere to a moral motive. Yet, less is known about what happens when moral motives are in conflict. We hypothesize that individuals engage in what we term "motive selection," namely adhering to the...

We consider a private sector job that offers high-powered incentives and two public sector jobs that produce an identical public good, but only one of them offers opportunities for corruption. Our theoretical predictions relate occupation and effort choices, in these three jobs, to preferences...