Passive behavior is ubiquitous - even when facing various alternatives to choose from, people commonly fail to take decisions. This paper provides evidence on the cognitive foundations of such "passive choices" and studies implications for policies that encourage active decision-making. In an...

We study cheating as a collective-risk social dilemma in a group setting in which individuals are asked to report their actual outcomes. Misreporting their outcomes increases the individual's earnings but when the sum of claims in the group reaches a certain threshold, a risk of collective...

Understanding the roots of human cooperation among strangers is of great importance for solving pressing social dilemmas and maintening public goods in human societies. We study the development of cooperation in 929 young children, aged 3 to 6. In a unified experimental framework, we examine...

In this paper we investigate whether the framing of the incentives used to foster participation into contexts characterized by high degrees of time pressure affects individuals' self-selection. At this aim we run a lab-in-the-field experiment structured in two parts. The first part investigates...

We show that the disposition to focus on favorable or unfavorable outcomes of risky situations affects willingness to take risk as measured by the general risk question. We demonstrate that this disposition, which we call risk conception, is strongly associated with optimism, a stable facet of...

We study time preferences by means of a longitudinal lab experiment involving both monetary and non-monetary rewards (leisure). Our novel design allows to measure whether participants prefer to anticipate or delay gratification, without imposing any structural assumption on the instantaneous...

Ambiguous prospects are ubiquitous in social and economic life, but the psychological foundations of behavior under ambiguity are still not well understood. One of the most robust empirical regularities is the strong correlation between attitudes towards ambiguity and compound risk which...

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...

Having an accurate account of preferences help governments design better policies for their citizens, organizations develop more efficient incentive schemes for their employees and adjust their product to better suit their clients' needs. The plethora of elicitation methods most commonly used...

In this paper, we provide an explanation for why risk taking is related to optimism. Using a laboratory experiment, we show that the degree of optimism predicts whether people tend to focus on the positive or negative outcomes of risky decisions. While optimists tend to focus on the good...