Information about the consequences of our consumption choices can be unwelcome, and people sometimes avoid it. We investigate a situation where one person possesses information that is inconvenient for another, and study why and when they decide to transmit that information. We introduce a...

We investigate the role of advisers in the transmission of ethically relevant information, a critical aspect of executive decision making in organizations. In our laboratory experiment, advisers are informed about the negative externalities associated with the decision-maker's choices and...

Women are often less willing than men to compete, even in tasks where there is no gender gap in performance. Also, many people experience competitive contexts as stressful and previous research has documented that men and women sometimes react differently to acute stressors. We use two...

We use fluctuations of female sex hormones occurring naturally over the menstrual cycle or induced by hormonal contraceptives to determine the importance of sex hormones in explaining gender differences in competitiveness. Participants in a laboratory experiment solve a simple arithmetics task...

We examine how multitasking affects performance and check whether women are indeed better at multitasking. Subjects in our experiment perform two different tasks according to three treatments: one where they perform the tasks sequentially, one where they are forced to multitask, and one where...

Explaining the evolution and maintenance of cooperation among unrelated individuals is one of the fundamental problems in biology and the social sciences. Recent experimental evidence suggests that altruistic punishment is an important mechanism to maintain cooperation among humans. In this...

People typically update their beliefs about their own abilities too little in response to feed-back, a phenomenon known as "conservatism", and some studies suggest that they overweight good relative to bad signals ("asymmetry"). We measure individual conservatism and asymmetry in three tasks...

Consumers often encounter, and claim to care about, ethical information concerning the products they purchase. Across three studies, we investigate how the accessibility of this information impacts choice. When consumers must seek out product attribute information, the impact of ethical...

Previous studies have shown that an oath can reduce lying at an individual level. Can oaths reduce lying in groups, a context where the prevalence of lying is typically higher? Results from a lab experiment reveal that the impact of an oath on lying in a group context depends on the incentive...

After having been ignored for a long time by economists, happiness is becoming an object of serious research in 21st century economics. In Section 2 we sketch the present status of happiness economics. In Section 3 we consider the practical applicability of happiness economics, retaining the...