Punishment typically involves depriving violators of resources they own such as money or labor. These resources can become revenue for authorities and thus motivate profit-seeking punishment. In this paper, we design a novel experiment to provide direct evidence on the role punishment plays in...

Expert advice is often biased in ways that benefit the advisor. We demonstrate how self-deception helps advisors be biased while preserving their self-image as ethical and identify limits to advisors' ability to self-deceive. In experiments where advisors recommend one of two investments to a...

We present evidence from laboratory experiments of behavioral spillovers and cognitive load that spread across strategic contexts. In the experiments, subjects play two distinct games simultaneously with different opponents. We find that the strategies chosen and the efficiency of outcomes in...

In a credence goods game with an expert and a consumer, we study experimentally the impact of two devices that are predicted to induce consumer-friendly behavior if the expert has a propensity to feel guilty when he believes that he violates the consumerʼs payoff expectations: (i) an...

The notions of one's social identity and group membership have recently become topics for economic theory and experiments, and recent research has shown the importance of identity in a wide array of economic environments. But predictions are unclear when there is some trade-off between one's...

This paper investigates in a principal–agent environment whether and how group membership influences the effectiveness of incentives and when incentives can have “hidden costs”, i.e., a detrimental effect. We show experimentally that in all interactions control mechanisms can have hidden...

One striking behavioral phenomenon is the “pull-to-center” bias in the newsvendor game: facing stochastic demand, subjects tend to order quantities between the expected profit maximizing quantity and mean demand. We show that the impulse balance equilibrium, which is based on a simple...

Researchers have demonstrated that the presence of people with social preferences has important economic implications. However, the empirical basis of this research relies to a large extent on experiments that do not provide anonymity between experimenter and subject. It has been argued that...

Minority games are a stylized description of strategic situations with both coordination and competition. These games are widely studied using either simulations or laboratory experiments. Simulations can show the dynamics of aggregate behavior, but the results of such simulations depend on the...

Psychologists claim that being treated kindly puts individuals in a positive emotional state: they then treat an unrelated third party more kindly. Numerous experiments document that subjects indeed ‘pay forward’ specific behavior. For example, they are less generous after having experienced...