Case studies of cartels and recent theory suggest that repeated communication is key for stable cooperation in environments where signals about others' actions are noisy. However, empirically the exact role of communication is not well understood. We study cooperation under different monitoring...

Being perceived as trustworthy comes with substantial economic benefits in many situations. Making other people think you are a trustworthy person may, therefore, be an important motive for charity and other forms of prosocial behavior, provided these activities work as signals of...

It has been shown that psychological predispositions to benefit others can motivate human cooperation and the evolution of such social preferences can be explained with kin or multi-level selection models. It has also been shown that cooperation can evolve as a costly signal of an unobservable...

NGOs and other non-profit organizations attract workers who strongly identify themselves with their missions. We study whether these "good guys" are more trustworthy and how such pronounced group identities affect trust and trustworthiness within the groups and toward out-groups. We find that...

We construct a model of redistributive politics where the central government is opportunistic and uses its discretion to make transfers to state governments on the basis of political considerations. These considerations are the alignment between the incumbent parties at the central and state...

In developing countries with weak institutions, there is implicitly a large reliance on elections to instill norms of accountability and reduce corruption. In this paper we show that electoral discipline may be ineffective in reducing corruption when political competition is too high or too low....

We examine the incentives to self-select into politics and how they depend on the transparency of the entry process. To this end, we set up a two-stage political competition model and test its key mechanisms in the lab. At the entry stage, potential candidates compete in a contest to become...

We investigate the potential of transparency to influence committee decision-making. We present a model in which career concerned committee members receive private information of different type-dependent accuracy, deliberate and vote. We study three levels of transparency under which career...

What motivates individuals to participate in social activism? Do awareness campaigns and information about others' willingness to act play a role? We conduct an online experiment within a survey of nearly 2000 Indian men, focusing on activism to combat health sector fraud during the COVID-19...

This chapter surveys recent literature on social networks and labour markets, with a specific focus on developing countries. It reviews existing research, in particular, on the use of social networks for hiring and the consequences of networks for on-the-job outcomes, including emerging...