We study the effect of an Iranian educational policy implemented in 2012 that restricted access to higher education for women in 30% of Iran’s public universities, mostly in sciences and engineering. To analyze the effect of the policy, we use a triple difference strategy across gender,...

This paper experimentally explores how the enforcement of cooperative behavior in a social dilemma is facilitated through institutional as well as emotional mechanisms. Recent studies emphasize the importance of negatively valued emotions, such as anger, which motivate individuals to punish free...

This paper reviews three distinct strategies in recent economics for using the concept of social identity in the explanation of individual behavior: Akerlof and Kranton’s neoclassical approach, Sen’s commitment approach, and Kirman et al.’s complexity approach. The primary focus is the...

The power to take game is a simple two player game where players arerandomly divided into pairs consisting of a take authority and responder.Both players in each pair have earned an own income in an individual realeffort decision-making experiment preceding the take game. The gameconsists of two...

This paper provides experimental evidence showing that indirectreciprocity may important in economic decision making and in thedevelopment of group norms. We study a `repeated helping game' withrandom pairing in large groups, with individuals equally dividedbetween donors and recipients. Donors...

Social norms permeate society across a wide range of issues and are important to understanding how societies function. In this paper we concentrate on 'bad' social norms - those that are inefficient or even damaging to a group. This paper explains how bad social norms evolve and persist; our...