Both the law and culture make a central distinction between acts of commission that overturn the status quo and acts of omission that uphold it. In everyday life acts of commission often elicit stronger reciprocal responses than do acts of omission. In this paper we compare reciprocal responses...

It has been reported that betrayal aversion in influences the trust decision (Bohnet and Zeckhauser 2004; Bohnet et al. 2008). This paper adds to the literature by examining how concern for others' disutility from betrayal can affect the decision to repay trust. We compare trustees' behavior when...

This paper reports the results of experiments designed to isolate the impact of various combinations of the following motives on trustworthiness: (i) unconditional other-regarding preferences -- like altruism, inequality aversion, quasi-maximin, etc.; (ii) deal-responsiveness -- reacting to...

Trust and trustworthiness are crucial to amelioration of social dilemmas. Distrust and malevolence aggravate social dilemmas. We use an experimental moonlighting game with a sample of the U.S. population, oversampling immigrants, to observe interactions between immigrants and native-born...

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A common methodology in experimental research is the use of random incentive mechanisms. This note investigates possible distortion induced by such mechanisms in the context of choice under risk. In the baseline (one task) treatment of our experiment we observe risk behavior in a given choice...

There is perhaps no more important question in public finance than who ultimately bears the burden of a tax. According to tax incidence theory, the long-run incidence of a tax in competitive markets is independent of the assignment of the liability to pay tax. Moreover, the theory is silent on...

The added costs from excess, wasted resources in healthcare are estimated to exceed the size of the entire defense budget. Effectively addressing this problem requires decreasing the cost of healthcare while increasing its quality by improving healthcare decision making. This paper reports...

Even though auctions are capturing an increasing share of commerce, they are typically treated in the theoretical economics literature as isolated. That is, an auction is typically treated as a single seller facing multiple buyers or as a single buyer facing multiple sellers. In this paper, we...

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