Many people judge that it is permissible to harm one person in order to save many in some circumstances but not in others: it matters how the harm comes about. Researchers have used trolley problems to investigate this phenomenon, eliciting moral judgments or behavioral predictions about...

Since the recent financial crisis, regulators and the general public have focused on financial speculation as one of its potential causes. In addition to the roles played by rating agencies and complicated financial engineering, speculative short sales have been put into question. However,...

Abstract German (English abstract is added below) Arbeitslosigkeit gilt als eines der schwerwiegendsten gesellschaftlichen Probleme unserer Zeit. Doch welche Gründe liegen, trotz der über die Jahre eingeleiteten Maßnahmen zur Bekämpfung der Arbeitslosigkeit, für die anhaltende...

We investigate whether individuals feel happier when others around them are happier in broadly defined worker groups. This will be a formal test of spillovers in happiness. Answering this question requires a careful handling of the reflection problem, as it may not be possible to separate the...

As societies are increasingly concerned with social risks, it is important to evaluate risks not only from an individual perspective, but also from a societal one. Many increases in social risk involve a simultaneous increase in risk and inequality. This paper presents an experiment which...

The need for justification is a widely observed social phenomenon. This paper develops a theoretical framework and reports laboratory evidence to show how pure justification pressure affects cooperative behavior in economic exchange environments. In a one-shot anonymous interaction, compared...

The focus of this study is on black markets which provide an important segment of the parallel economy. These markets operate in disequilibrium,search and information costs become very important.Trafficking in drugs taken as case, to explore both theoretically and empirically. The problem,...

This study evaluates people’s concerns for distributive fairness (equality of outcomes and payoffs to those worse-off) and reciprocal fairness (receiving what one is due based on one’s past actions) using dictator, ultimatum, and trust games. In the dictator games we classify individuals’...

It is difficult to identify acts that are purely altruistic, and do not have some level of egoism or self-interest involved. By considering situations where team members seemingly have nothing to gain by the way they distribute points to others with regard to peer evaluation, and where their...

Parties in a bargaining situation may perceive guilt, a utility loss caused by receiving the larger share that is modeled in some social preferences. I extend Rubinstein (1982)'s solution of the open-ended alternating-offer bargaining problem for self-interested bargainers to a game with equally...