Are people willing to sacrifice resources to save one's and others' face? In a laboratory experiment, we study whether individuals forego resources to avoid the public exposure of the least performer in their group. We show that a majority of individuals are willing to pay to preserve not only...

We introduce the concept of "group cohesion" to capture the economic consequences of ubiquitous social relationships in group production. We measure group cohesion, adapting the "oneness scale" from psychology. A comprehensive program of new experiments reveals the considerable economic impact...

A key solution for public good provision is the voluntary formation of institutions that commit players to cooperate. Such institutions generate inequality if some players decide not to participate but cannot be excluded from cooperation benefits. Prior research with small groups emphasizes the...

There is continuing debate about what explains cooperation and self-sacrifice in nature and in particular in humans. This paper suggests a new way to think about this famous problem. I argue that, for an evolutionary biologist as well as a quantitative social scientist, the triangle of two...

We show that once interfamily exchanges are considered, Becker's rotten kids mechanism has some remarkable implications that have gone hitherto unnoticed. Specifically, we establish that Cornes and Silva's (1999) result of efficiency in the contribution game amongst siblings extends to a setting...

We extend the literature structurally estimating social preferences by accounting for the desire to adhere to social norms. Our representative agent is strongly motivated by norms and failing to account for this causes us to overestimate how much agents care about helping those who are worse...