A long-standing challenge for welfare economics is to develop welfare criteria that can be applied to allocations with different population levels. Such a criterion is essential to resolve the optimal population problem, i.e., the tradeoff between population size and the welfare of each person...

Typically, when two people decide to become parents, they procreate by copulation and produce a child. What do people do if, for some reason, they can't produce their own children but want to be parents? Today, a prospective parent can go to the web, drop a vial of sperm from a donor with...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly becomes an indispensable advisor. New ethical concerns arise if AI persuades people to behave dishonestly. In an experiment, we study how AI advice (generated by a Natural-Language-processing algorithm) affects (dis)honesty, compare it to equivalent...

Is humanity's circle of moral concern expanding, as often claimed? I explore frequencies of morally universal language in 15m book publications in American English, British English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian from 1800-2000. In each language, morally universal terminology diminished...

This paper studies how individual characteristics, institutions, and their interaction influence moral decisions. We validate a moral paradigm focusing on the willingness to accept harming third parties. Consequences of moral decisions are real. We explore how moral behavior varies with...

Markets are ubiquitous in our daily life and, despite many imperfections, they are a great source of human welfare. Nevertheless, there is a heated recent debate on whether markets erode social responsibility and moral behavior. In fact, competitive pressure on markets may create strong...

Numerous signaling models in economics assume image concerns. These take two forms, as relating either to social image or self-image. While empirical work has identified the behavioral importance of the former, little is known about the role of self-image concerns. We exogenously vary self-image...