During the last two decades economists have made much progress in understanding incentives, contracts and organisations. Yet, they constrained their attention to a very narrow and empirically questionable view of human motivation. The purpose of this paper is to show that this narrow view of...

Well-functioning groups enforce social norms that restrain opportunism, but the social structure of a society may encourage or inhibit norm enforcement. Here we study how the exogenous assignment to different positions in an extreme social hierarchy - the caste system - affects individuals'...

In this paper we evaluate the QALY losses, which are linked to the prevalence of specific chronic illnesses and impediments. The analysis is based on the individual self-rating health satisfaction question asked in the British Household Panel Survey data set. Our method is a refinement of the...

In this paper we evaluate the QALY losses, which are linked to the prevalence of specific chronic illnesses and impediments. The analysis is based on the individual self-rating health satisfaction question asked in the British Household Panel Survey data set. Our method is a refinement of the...

We study how the distribution of other-regarding preferences develops with age. Based on a set of allocation choices, we can classify each of 717 subjects, aged 8 to 17 years, as either egalitarian, altruistic, or spiteful. Varying the allocation recipient as either an in-group or an out-group...

The most fundamental solution concepts in Game Theory Nash equilibrium, backward induction, and iterated elimination of dominated strategies are based on the assumption that people are capable of predicting others' actions. These concepts require people to be able to view the game from the other...

There is vast heterogeneity in the human willingness to weigh others' interests in decision making. This heterogeneity concerns the motivational intricacies as well as the strength of other-regarding behaviors, and raises the question how one can parsimoniously model and characterize...

Increasing inequality and associated egalitarian sentiments have again put redistribution on the political agenda. Other-regarding preferences may also affect support for redistribution, but knowledge about their distribution in the broader population and how they are associated with political...