Many of our most pressing challenges, from combating climate change to dealing with pandemics, are collective action problems: situations in which individual and collective interests conflict with each other. In such situations people face a dilemma about making individually costly but...

Though many in the general public are concerned about climate change, most are unaware that agriculture and food production accounts for about one quarter of aggregate green house emissions and therefore, diet change is one of the most effective ways that individuals can reduce their climate...

We perform an incentivized experiment designed to assess the accuracy of beliefs about characteristics and decisions. Subjects are asked to declare some specific choices and characteristics with different levels of observability from an external point of view, and typically formed through real...

We live in a high-divorce age. It is now common for university faculty to have students who are touched by a recent divorce. It is likely that parents themselves worry about effects on their children. Yet there has been almost no formal research into the important issue of how recent...

The paper provides evidence that happiness raises productivity. In Experiment 1, a randomized trial is designed. Some subjects have their happiness levels increased, while those in a control group do not. Treated subjects have 12% greater productivity in a paid piece-rate Niederle-Vesterlund...

We present the first attempt to construct a long-run historical measure of subjective wellbeing using language corpora derived from millions of digitized books. While existing measures of subjective wellbeing go back to at most the 1970s, we can go back at least 200 years further using our...

We find a strong relationship between risk-loving preferences and cognitive ability which becomes stronger as adherence to the generalized axiom of revealed preference (a proxy for rationality) increases. Our results are taken from a field study of individuals at the very bottom of the income...

Many governments wish to assess the quality of their universities. A prominent example is the UK's new Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014. In the REF, peer-review panels will be provided with information on publications and citations. This paper suggests a way in which panels could choose...

Group identity is known to exert a powerful socio-psychological influence on behaviour but to date has been largely explored as a uni-dimensional phenomenon. We consider the role of multiple dimensions of identity, asking what might happen to ingroup and outgroup perceptions and the resulting...

Iran has the world's only government-regulated kidney market. We report the results of the first field study of donor behaviour in this unusual market. Participants have lower risk tolerance and higher patience levels than the Iranian average but display no difference in rationality from...