We study the relative effectiveness of contracts that are framed either in terms of bonuses or penalties. In one set of treatments subjects know at the time of effort provision whether they have achieved the bonus / avoided the penalty. In another set of treatments subjects only learn the...

There is by now ample evidence from laboratory experiments that individuals exhibit "prosocial" or "other-regarding" preferences. However, a key question is whether the importance of other-regarding preferences documented in the laboratory can be readily generalized to draw conclusions about the...

While numerous experiments demonstrate how pro-sociality can influence economic decision-making, evidence on explicitly anti-social economic behavior has thus far been limited. In this paper we investigate the importance of spite in experimental rent-seeking contests. Although, as we show,...

We report the results of laboratory experiments on rent-seeking contests with endogenous participation. Theory predicts that (a) contest entry and rent-seeking expenditures increase with the size of the prize; and (b) earnings are equalized between the contest and the outside option. While the...

People contribute more to public goods, the more others give ('crowding-in'). We investigate two possible causes of crowding-in: reciprocity, the usual explanation, and conformism, a neglected alternative. The issue is important since conformism has more scope to bring about endogenous social...

We study the interaction between competition and social proximity on altruism, trust, and reciprocity. We decompose the behavioral channels by utilizing variants of both the Trust Game and the Dictator Game in a design that systematically controls the transmission of relevant information. Our...

We conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment with 567 children, aged four to eleven, in which we investigate the effect of social norms on lying and test whether norm sensitivity changes with age. Children think about a number between 1 and 6 in private, then roll a die, and report whether the...

We provide a framework to uncover behavioural mechanisms driving potential cross-societal differences in voluntary cooperation. We deploy our framework in one-shot public goods experiments in the US and the UK, and in Morocco and Turkey. We find that cooperation is higher in the US and UK than...