Individuals belonging to a social group make judgments about their relative standing within the group as well as about the relative standing of their group among other groups. On average, individuals exhibit overconfidence bias in both types of judgments in a variety of settings. We hypothesize,...

A recent literature emphasizes that gender differences in the labor market may in part be driven by a gender gap in willingness to compete. However, whereas experiments in this literature typically investigate willingness to compete in private environments, real world competitions often have a...

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...

No behavior sits in a vacuum, and one behavior can greatly affect what happens next. We propose a conceptual frame within which a broad range of behavioral spillovers can be accounted for when applying behavioral science to policy challenges. We consider behaviors which take place sequentially...

We investigate the effects of a range of different types of anchor on WTP and WTA valuations of familiar consumer products, elicited through individuals’ buying or selling decisions at given prices. We find anchoring effects only when the anchor value is framed as a plausible price for the...

In this paper, we describe three different experiments that explore participants’ risk attitude. When we analyzed the average results, we found that participants behave as the S-shape value function predicts. However, breaking the data down on the individual level reveals that the S-shape is...

Experiments show that people give money away to other people, even when contributions are anonymous. These findings contradict the common economic assumption that people maximize their own payoffs. Here we take the approach that human altruism is shaped by a set of cognitive models for distinct...

The paper presents an experiment testing the hypothesis that, if consumers’ valuation of a product is shaped by past experiences of prices, it may be more profitable for firms to follow the opposite strategy of pricing higher and then lower. We ran an individual choice experiment with a posted...

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’...

We study the effects of the tax burden on tax evasion both theoretically and experimentally. We develop a theoretical framework of tax evasion decisions that is based on two behavioral assumptions: (1) taxpayers are endowed with reference dependent preferences that are subject to hedonic...