The effect of different audit patterns on future compliance is studied in two experiments. A repeated measures design is used with participants filing taxes 60 times. Study 1 focuses on taxpayers' immediate reactions to audits and examines whether a strong decrease in compliance following an...

According to a tradition that goes back to David Hume, social conventions have a natural tendency to turn into norms. Normativity increases compliance and stabilizes individual behaviour in spite of changes in incentives. In this paper we report experimental data that confirm this insight and...

We present an experiment designed to test whether experienced regret and rejoicing evoked in a risk choice have an impact on subsequent intertemporal choice. We found that regret and rejoicing experienced prior to an intertemporal choice influenced considerably the way people relate to future:...

We used decision-making experiments to investigate tax compliance of women and men and focused on gender-role orientation as well as on the second-to-fourth digit ratio (2D:4D), a putative marker of prenatal testosterone exposure. In 60 experimental periods, participants were endowed with a...

Although people normally prefer a more certain option over a riskier option of equal expected value, sometimes they are tempted to choose the riskier, but more rewarding one. Such temptation is even stronger when people decide for the distant future as compared with the near future. In...