This paper studies how organizational design affects moral outcomes. Subjects face the decision to either kill mice for money or to save mice. We compare a Baseline treatment where subjects are fully pivotal to a Diffused-Pivotality treatment where subjects simultaneously choose in groups of...

Many real-world mechanisms are “noisy” or “fuzzy”, that is the institutions in place to implement them operate with non-negligible degrees of imprecision and error. This observation raises the more general question of whether mechanisms that work in theory are also robust to more...

Is the willingness to make trades influenced by how the total gains from trade are split between the trading partners? We present results from a bilateral trade game (n = 128) where all participants were price-takers and trading pairs faced one of three exogenously imposed trading prices. The...

We link life-satisfaction data to inequality of the pre-government income distribution at the regional level, to estimate the degree of inequality aversion. In addition, we investigate whether a reduction in inequality by the state increases individual well-being. We find that Germans are...

Using controlled experiments, we examine how individuals make choices when faced with multiple options. Choice tasks are designed to mimic the selection of health insurance, prescription drug, or retirement savings plans. In our experiment, available options can be objectively ranked allowing us...

This paper reconsiders evidence from experimental common pool resource games from the perspective of a model of payoff sampling. Despite being parameter-free, the model is able to replicate some striking features of the data, including single-peaked frequency distributions, the persistent use of...

The Type Indeterminacy model is a theoretical framework that uses some elements of quantum formalism to model the constructive preference perspective suggested by Kahneman and Tversky. In a dynamic decision context, type indeterminacy induces a game with multiple selves associated with a state...

Two deviations of alternating-offer bargaining behavior from economic theory are observed together, yet have been studied separately. Players who could secure themselves a large surplus share if bargainers were purely self-interested incompletely exploit their advantage. Delay in agreement...

Multiplicative growth processes that are subject to random shocks often have a skewed distribution of outcomes. A simple laboratory experiment shows that participants either strongly underestimate skewness or ignore it completely. The participants' choices reveal bounds on their subjective...