People benefit from being perceived as trustworthy. Examples include sellers trying to attract buyers, or candidates in elections trying to attract voters. In a laboratory experiment using exchange games, in which the trustor can choose the trustee, we study whether trustees can signal their...

Affirmative action rules are often implemented to promote women on labor markets. Little is known, however, about how and whether such rules emerge endogenously in groups of potentially affected subjects. We experimentally investigate whether subjects vote for affirmative action rules, against,...

Many decisions taken in legislatures or committees are subject to lobbying efforts. A seminal contribution to the literature on vote-buying is the legislative lobbying model pioneered by Groseclose and Snyder (1996), which predicts that lobbies will optimally form supermajorities in many cases....

We compare experimentally the revealed distributional preferences of individuals and teams in allocation tasks. We find that teams are significantly more benevolent than individuals in the domain of disadvantageous inequality while the benevolence in the domain of advantageous inequality is...

We investigate the potential of transparency to influence committee decision-making. We present a model in which career concerned committee members receive private information of different type-dependent accuracy, deliberate and vote. We study three levels of transparency under which career...

We examine the incentives to self-select into politics and how they depend on the transparency of the entry process. To this end, we set up a two-stage political competition model and test its key mechanisms in the lab. At the entry stage, potential candidates compete in a contest to become...

Ostracism, or exclusion by peers, has been practiced since ancient times as a severe form of punishment against transgressors of laws or social norms. The purpose of this paper is to offer a comprehensive analysis on how ostracism affects behavior and the functioning of a social group. We...

Being perceived as trustworthy comes with substantial economic benefits in many situations. Making other people think you are a trustworthy person may, therefore, be an important motive for charity and other forms of prosocial behavior, provided these activities work as signals of...

It has been shown that psychological predispositions to benefit others can motivate human cooperation and the evolution of such social preferences can be explained with kin or multi-level selection models. It has also been shown that cooperation can evolve as a costly signal of an unobservable...

We study the choice of a principal to either delegate a decision to a group of careerist experts, or to consult them individually and keep the decision-making power. Our model predicts a trade-off between information acquisition and information aggregation. On the one hand, the expected benefit...