This paper studies whether prosocial values are transmitted from parents to their children. We do so through an economic experiment in which children and their parents play a standard public goods game. The experimental data presents us with a surprising result. While we find significant...

We study the effect of transaction costs (e.g., a trading fee or a transaction tax, like the Tobin tax) on the aggregation of private information in financial markets. We implement a financial market with sequential trading and transaction costs in the laboratory. According to theory, eventually...

Does transparent leadership promote cooperative groups? We address this issue using a public goods experiment with exogenously selected leaders who are able to send non-binding contribution suggestions to the group. To investigate the effect of transparency in this setting we vary the ease with...

Previous research offers compelling evidence that leaders suffice to effect efficiency-enhancements on cooperation, yet the source of this effect remains unclear. To investigate whether leadership effects can be attributed exclusively to the common information that leaders provide to a group,...

Substantial evidence from psychology suggests that resisting temptation (exercising self-control) in one domain subsequently reduces one's capacity to regulate behavior in other domains. A reason is that people have limited self-regulatory resources, and self-regulatory failure occurs when these...

Recent research suggests that while betrayal aversion may have negative effects, the presence of betrayal-averse agents is beneficial in reducing trustees’ willingness to betray trust. In light of this, many common knowledge institutions may have adopted rules and features which mitigate the...

Kahneman and Tversky (1979) argued that risky decisions in high stakes environments can be informed using questionnaires with hypothetical choices. Yet results by Holt and Laury (2002) suggest that questionnaire responses and decisions in hypothetical and low monetary payoff environments do not...

Substantial evidence from psychology suggests that resisting temptation (exercising self-control) in one domain subsequently reduces one's capacity to regulate behavior in other domains. A reason is that people have limited self-regulatory resources, and self-regulatory failure occurs when these...

Violent conflict destroys resources. It generates “destruction costs.” These costs have an important effect on individuals’ decisions to cooperate or conflict. We develop two models of conflict: one in which conflict's destruction costs are independent of individuals’ investments in...