Gift giving is thought to decrease welfare. Recipients are sometimes stuck with gifts they would not have purchased because the giver does not perfectly know the recipient's preferences and in-kind gifts cannot be costlessly refunded. Such gifts are welfare reducing compared to giving cash if,...

We show that temporally distancing the decision task from the payment of the reward increases honest behavior. Each of 427 Israeli soldiers fulfilling their mandatory military service rolled a six-sided die in private and reported the outcome to the unit's cadet coordinator. For every point...

The public finance literature demonstrates the equivalence between consumption and labor-income (wage) taxes. We introduce an experimental paradigm in which individuals make real labor-leisure choices and spend their earned income on real goods. We use this paradigm to test whether a...