We measure the social norms of sharing income with kin and neighbors in villages in Kenya. We find a plurality of norms: from a strict norm prohibiting wealth accumulation to a norm facilitating saving. Several individual and social network characteristics predict the norms upheld; the pro-saving...

We validate experimentally a new survey item to measure the preference for competition. The item, which measures participants' agreement with the statement "Competition brings the best out of me", predicts individuals' willingness to compete in the laboratory after controlling for their ability,...

According to the Description-Experience gap (DE gap), people act as if overweighting rare events when information about those events is derived from descriptions but as if underweighting rare events when they experience them through a sampling process. While the is now clear evidence that the DE...

While economic crises tend to raise questions about a fair distribution of resources, less is known about whether and how fairness views themselves are affected by negative shocks. To answer this question, I conduct two experimental studies investigating the causal link between income shocks and...

The Description-Experience gap (DE gap) is widely thought of as a tendency for people to act as if overweighting rare events when information about those events is derived from descriptions but as if underweighting rare events when they experience them through a sampling process. While there is...

Existing research has demonstrated carryover effects whereby emotions generated in one context influence decisions in other, unrelated ones. We examine the carryover effect in relation to valuations of risky and ambiguous lotteries with a novel focus on comparing the carryovers arising from a...

In a variety of individual decision contexts, people have been shown to exhibit presentbiased time preferences. Little is known, however, about discounting when there are trade-offs between own and others' consumption. In this paper, we provide a systematic analysis of present bias in individual...

This study shows that different belief concepts within the same religion can have different effects on distributive behaviour. A dictator game experiment measures the causal effects of the concepts of God and Jesus on both the prosociality of Christians and their propensity to discriminate...

People are generally assumed to shy away from activities generating stochastic rewards, thus requiring extra compensation for handling any additional risk. In contrast with this view, neuroscience research with animals has shown that stochastic rewards may act as a powerful motivator. Applying...

There is astounding variation in product quality sold in markets even when quality is difficult to ascertain and rules are poorly enforced. We investigate whether sellers differ in innate honesty (incur private cost to provide good quality) and whether this explains the variation in quality. Our...