Individuals often have to decide to which degree of risk they want to expose others, or how much risk to accept if their choice has an externality on third parties. One typical application is a household. We run an experiment in the German Socio-Economic Panel with two members from 494...

Narratives pervade almost any aspect of our life and play a particularly important role in moral and prosocial decision-making. We study how positive (stories in favor of a prosocial action) and negative (stories in favor of a selfish action) narratives influence prosocial behavior. Our main...

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...

While social norms have received great attention within economics, little is known about the role of personal norms. We propose a simple utility framework - which assumes that people care about monetary payoff, social norms, and personal norms - and design a novel two-part experiment to...

In this paper, we show that the right to determine the sequence of moves in a dynamic team tournament improves the chances of winning the contest. Because studying dynamic team tournaments - like R&D races - with interim feedback is difficult with company data, we examine decisions of highly...

We use a novel method to elicit and measure higher order risk preferences (prudence and temperance) in an experiment with 658 adolescents. In line with theoretical predictions, we find that higher order risk preferences - particularly prudence - are strongly related to adolescents' field...

Frequently deciding legal cases requires an assessment in multiple, conceptually incompatible dimensions. Often one normative concern would call for one decision, and another normative concern for a different decision. The decision-maker must engage in balancing, with no help from overarching...

Existing models of regret aversion assume that individuals can make an ex-post comparison between their choice and a foregone alternative. Yet in many situations such a comparison can be made only if someone else chose the alternative option. We develop a model where regret-averse agents must...

We investigate the influence of self and social image concerns as potential sources of lying costs. In a standard die-rolling experiment, we exogenously manipulate self-awareness and observability, which mediate the focus of a person on their private and public selves, respectively. First, we...

We study whether and how parents interfere paternalistically in their children's intertemporal decision-making. Based on experiments with over 2,000 members of 610 families, we find that parents anticipate their children's present bias and aim to mitigate it. Using a novel method to measure...