Betrayal aversion has been operationalized as the evidence that subjects demand a higher risk premium to take social risks compared to natural risks. This evidence has been first shown by Bohnet and Zeckhauser (2004) using an adaptation of the Becker-DeGroot-Marshak mechanism (BDM, Becker et al....

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...

We report a laboratory experiment testing whether social reference points impact effort provision. Subjects are randomly assigned the role of worker or peer and the worker observes the peer's earnings before participating in a real-effort task. Between treatments, we exogenously manipulate peer...

A stream of research examining the effect of punishment on conformity indicates that punishment can backfire and lead to suboptimal social outcomes. In such studies, the enforcement of a behavioral rule to cooperate originates from a single party. This feature may raise concern about the...

Previous studies have shown that individuals are less likely to help a person in need when there are "bystanders" present who can also offer help. We designed an experiment to re-examine this "bystander effect" using modified dictator games. We find lower giving rates in the presence of...

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...

Can we use the lens of dual-system theories to explain altruistic behavior? In recent years this question has attracted the interest of both economists and psychologists. We contribute to this emerging literature, by reporting both the results of a meta-study of the literature and a new...

In this paper we show that making choices that involve conflicts between self-interest and otherregarding concerns may deplete cognitive resources and willpower and thus reduce individuals' ability to exert self-control. In a lab experiment we use a series of modified dictator games to...

A burgeoning literature in economics has started examining the role of social norms in explaining economic behavior. Surprisingly, the vast majority of this literature has studied social norms in asocial decision settings, where individuals are observed to act in isolation from each other. In...

A popular empirical technique to measure norms uses coordination games to elicit what subjects in an experiment consider appropriate behavior in a given situation (Krupka and Weber, 2013). The Krupka-Weber method works under the assumption that subjects use their normative expectations to solve...