Many important intertemporal decisions are made by groups rather than individuals. What happens to collective decisions when there is internal conflict about the tradeoff between present and future has not been thoroughly investigated so far. We study experimentally the causal effect of group...

A stream of research examining the effect of punishment on conformity indicates that punishment can backfire and lead to suboptimal social outcomes. We examine whether this effect is due to a lack of perceived legitimacy of rule enforcement, enabling agents to justify selfish behavior. We...

Observed individual behavior in the presence of ambiguity is characterized by insufficient responsiveness to changes in subjective likelihoods. Such likelihood insensitivity under ambiguity is integral to theoretical models and predictive of behavior in many important domains such as financial...

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 social and economic interactions, individuals often exploit informational asymmetries and behave dishonestly to pursue private ends. In many of these situations the costs and benefits from dishonest behavior do not accrue immediately and at the same time. In this paper, we experimentally...

Meritocracies aspire to reward effort and hard work but promise not to judge individuals by the circumstances they were born into. The choice to work hard is, however, often shaped by circumstances. This study investigates whether people's merit judgments are sensitive to this endogeneity of...

Overconfidence is one of the most ubiquitous cognitive bias. There is copious evidence of overconfidence being relevant in a diverse set of economic domains. In this paper, we relate the recent concept of cognitive uncertainty with overconfidence. Cognitive uncertainty represents a decision...

Can elections change people’s ideas about what is ethically right and what is wrong? A number of recent observations suggest that social norms can change rapidly as a result of election outcomes. We explore this conjecture using a controlled online experiment. In our experiment, participants...

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to profoundly transform and enrich experimental economic research. We propose a new software framework, "alter_ego", which makes it easy to design experiments between LLMs and to integrate LLMs into oTreebased experiments with human subjects. Our...

Social norms pervade human interaction, but their demands are often in conflict. To understand behavior, it is thus crucial to know how individuals resolve normative tradeoffs. This paper proposes that sincere judgments about the relative importance of conflicting norms are shaped by personal...