We examine the willingness to donate depending on whether “misery” is random generated or self-inflicted by too high demands in bilateral negotiations. We find that randomness has a positive influence on the total amount of donation. In case of self-inflicted “misery” we observe that the...

Phenomena like meat sharing in hunter-gatherers, altruistic self-sacrifice in intergroup conflicts, and contribution to the production of public goods in laboratory experiments have led to the development of numerous theories trying to explain human prosocial preferences and behavior. Many of...

This paper deals with social acceptance of applying the equity principle for intra-familial time transfers. Based on a representative survey among German citizens, the author provides empirical evidence on acceptance of financial compensation for different time transfers. Some 80% of the...

We conduct a field experiment on direct and indirect transfer mechanisms. It shows that people are willing to donate significantly more if the donation is indirect, i.e., it is tied to the purchase of a good with a price premium, rather than made directly. This points to an...

A variety of different social contexts have been used when measuring distributional preferences. This could be problematic as different degrees of social interdependence may affect people’s distributional preferences, and this contextual variance may inadvertently muddle the measurement...

Based on the well-known observation that social norms can guide individual behavior, this paper empirically examines the causal effect of related information interventions on revealed climate protection activities, measured through incentivized donations. In our field-experi-mental setting, we...

We investigate the motives of pro-social behavior in collective decisions in an economic experiment. It compares individual behavior in private and collective decisions in a unified experimental setup. Subjects are given an individual endowment and have to decide how much of it to donate to...

That institutions matter is widely accepted among economists and so are social norms as an important category of informal institutions. Social norms matter in many economic situations, but in particular for markets. The economic literature has studied the interrelation between markets and social...

This paper suggests that feedback effects between technological progress and human longevity lie at the heart of their common emergence in human history. It connects two major research questions. First, the long life span after menopause is a unique but puzzling feature of humans among primates....

Using a simple OLG model where the research output of one generation provides inputs for the next, the paper explains how quality standards can become established in scientific competition. Researchers seek status, which they get if their results are used by the next generation. Quality is...