We report results from a dictator game experiment with nurse students and real estate broker students as dictators, and Amnesty International as the recipient. Although brokers contributed substantial amounts, nurses contributed significantly more, on average 76 percent of their endowment. In a...

We study belief updating about relative performance in an ego-relevant task. Manipulating the perceived ego-relevance of the task, we show that subjects update their beliefs optimistically because they derive direct utility flows from holding positive beliefs. This finding provides a behavioral...

Efficiency under contractual incompleteness often requires voluntary cooperation in situations where self-regarding incentives for contractual compliance are present as well. Here we provide a comprehensive experimental analysis based on the gift-exchange game of how explicit and implicit...

Explicit and implicit incentives and opportunities for mutually beneficial voluntary cooperation co-exist in many contractual relationships. In a series of eight laboratory gift-exchange experiments, we show that incentive contracts can lead to crowding out of voluntary cooperation even after...

We study the individual behavior of students and workers in an experiment where they repeatedly face the same cooperative task. The data show that clerical workers differ from college students in overall cooperation rates, strategy adoption and use of punishment opportunities. Students cooperate...

Is there a rational component in the decision to commit suicide? Economists have been trying to shed light on this question by studying whether suicide rates are related to contemporaneous conditions. This paper goes one step further: we test whether suicides are linked to forward-looking...

This paper analyses the welfare effects of price restrictions on private contracting in a world where agents have a limited cognitive ability. People compute the costs and benefits of entering a transaction with an error. The government knows the distribution of true costs and benefits as well...

This paper deals with one of the main empirical problems associated with the rational addiction theory, namely that its derived demand equation is not empirically distinguishable from models with forward looking behavior, but with time inconsistent preferences. The implication is that, even when...

In several countries social assistance dependence has been increasing since the 1980s. After surveying the theoretical and empirical take-up literature, this study presents estimates of recent rates of non take-up of social assistance benefits. Once methodological shortcomings of prior...