We add social norms into Laffont’s mechanism designed for environmental risk. We find with endogenous social norms and asymmetric information about personal norms, the optimal contract induces more (less) effort from the “green” (“brown”) firm.

Hyperbolic discounting with naiveté is widely believed to provide a better explanation than exponential discounting of why people borrow so much and why they wait so long to save for retirement. We reach a different set of conclusions. We show that if financial planning is enriched to include...

We conduct experiments with adolescent participants on repeated fixed play in three different zero-sum games which have mixed strategy minimax solutions. Further, we collect subject information on cognitive abilities and participation rates in competitive activities. We find the adolescents’...

I put forward a concise and intuitive formula for the calculation of the valuation for a good in the presence of the expectation that further, related, goods will soon become available. This valuation is tractable in the sense that it does not require the explicit resolution of the consumer’s...

How do people react to a mix of good deeds to a third party and bad deeds against them? A modified ultimatum game shows that previous good deeds make responders substantially more tolerant to unfair proposals.

Since the enactment of Pension Protection Act of 2006, lifecycle funds that reduce exposure to stocks with age have rapidly replaced money market funds as the most commonly nominated default investment options for participant-directed retirement plans. We examine their appropriateness in meeting...

We observe that identification of the discount rate from experimental data requires an assumption about the consumption period, the length of time over which a payment will be turned into utility-providing consumption. We show that the optimal consumption period is substantially longer than...

We test experimentally a prediction of the ‘moral credit model’, in which committing a virtuous act creates moral credits that can license immoral behavior in a succeeding decision. We use a basic cheating experiment that was either preceded by a virtuous deed or not in a developing country...

Enforcement can affect compliance directly and indirectly, through spillovers. We study intertemporal enforcement spillovers by conducting a randomized field experiment in a university exam. The initial phase of the experiment is the exam itself. We induce variation in enforcement by randomly...

We investigate the role personality plays in Finitely Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma (FRPD) games. Even after controlling for demographic factors such as race, course of study, and cognitive ability, we find that cooperative behavior is significantly related to the Big Five personality trait...