Zimbabwean villagers of distinct background have resettled in government organized land reforms for more than three decades. Against this backdrop, I assess the level of social cohesion in some of the newly established communities by estimating average preferences for fairness in a structural...

This paper conducts a laboratory experiment to investigate the role of social connections in behavioral indirect reciprocity. We provide the evidence of spillovers effects of social ties, e.g., the recipient’s indirect reciprocal act varies with the relations between the donor and a third...

We show and explain how generosity beyond that explainable by social preferences can manifest in bargaining. We analyze an ultimata game with two parties vying to coalesce with a randomly chosen proposer. They simultaneously demand shares of the surplus. The proposer must then make an offer that...

We report a framed field experiment, in which we study the effectiveness of punishment and reward in sustaining cooperation in a social dilemma. Punishments tend to be directed at non-cooperators and rewards are assigned by those who are relatively cooperative. In contrast to the results...

This paper proposes two generalization of the core and evaluates them on experimental data of assignment games (workers and firms negotiate wages and matching). The generalizations proposed allow for social utility components (e.g. altruism) and random utility components (e.g. logistic...

It is well-known that subjects in bilateral bargaining experiments often exhibit choice behavior suggesting there are strong reciprocators in the population. But it is controversial whether explaining this data requires a social preference model that invokes genuine strong reciprocity or whether...

The mirror-neuron system (MNS) becomes instigated when the spectator empathizes with the principal’s intention. MNS also involves imitation, where empathy is irrelevant. While the former may attenuate the principal’s emotion, the latter paradoxically reinforces it. This paper proposes a...

We report laboratory data on earned wealth effects in a series of anonymous dictator games. In addition to a standard (baseline) treatment in which wealth was determined by the experimenter, we conduct treatments in which either the dictator or the receiver earned wealth used in the subsequent...

Cooperation is a pervasive social phenomenon but more often than not economic theories have little to say about its causes and consequences. In this paper, we explore the hypothesis that cooperative behaviour might be motivated by purely selfish interest when the “social” payoff in a game is...

Taking note of the wide variety and growing list of models in the literature to explain patterns of behavior observed in laboratory experiments, this paper identifies two tests, the Variety Test (ability of a model to explain outcomes under variety or alternative scenarios) and the Psychological...