This paper proposes a method for empirically mapping psychological personality traits to economic preferences. Careful modelling of random components of decision making is crucial to establishing the long supposed but empirically elusive link between economic and psychological systems for...

We present a semiparametric method to estimate group-level dispersion, which is particularly effective in the presence of censored data. We apply this procedure to obtain measures of occupation-specific wage dispersion using top-coded administrative wage data from the German IAB Employment...

Political polarization has ruptured the fabric of U.S. society. The focus of this paper is to examine various layers of (non-)strategic decision-making that are plausibly affected by political polarization through the lens of one's feelings of hate and love for Donald J. Trump. In several...

People differ in their willingness to take risks. Recent work found that revealed preference tasks (e.g., laboratory lotteries) - a dominant class of measures - are outperformed by survey-based stated preferences, which are more stable and predict real-world risk taking across different domains....

We investigate the relationship between political attitudes and prosociality in a survey of a representative sample of the U.S. population during the first summer of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that an experimental measure of prosociality correlates positively with adherence to protective...

Achieving successful behavior change via nudging is hard. This is particularly true when choice architects attempt to change behavior that is collectively harmful but individually beneficial. In this paper, we review the state-of-the-art of the behavior change literature to assess both robust...

Many intertemporal trade-offs are unbalanced: while the advantages of options are concen- trated in a few periods, the disadvantages are dispersed over numerous periods. We provide novel experimental evidence for 'concentration bias', the tendency to overweight advantages that are concentrated...

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...

Social preferences facilitate the internalization of health externalities, for example by reducing mobility during a pandemic. We test this hypothesis using mobility data from 258 cities worldwide alongside experimentally validated measures of social preferences. Controlling for time-varying...

Descriptive norms - the behavior of other individuals in one's reference group - play a key role in shaping individual decisions. When characterizing the behavior of others, a standard approach in the literature is to focus on average behavior. In this paper, we argue both theoretically and...