People's fairness preferences are an important constraint for what constitutes an acceptable economic transaction, yet little is known about how these preferences are formed. In this paper, we provide clean evidence that previous transactions play an important role in shaping perceptions of...

We investigate the determinants of giving in a lab-in-the-field experiment with large stakes. Study participants in urban Mozambique play dictator games where their counterpart is the closest person to them outside their household. When given the option, dictators do a large fraction of giving...

The distinct historical and cultural experiences of American blacks and whites may influence whether members of those groups perceive a particular exchange as fair. We investigate racial differences in fairness standards using preferences for equal treatment in the ultimatum game, where...

This paper discusses what determines the preferences of individuals for redistribution. We review the theoretical literature and provide a framework to incorporate various effects previously studied separately in the literature. We then examine empirical evidence for the US, using the General...

Optimal policy rules--including those regarding income taxation, commodity taxation, public goods, and externalities--are typically derived in models with homogeneous preferences. This article reconsiders many central results for the case in which preferences for commodities, public goods, and...

Even though social preferences affect nearly every facet of life, there exist many open questions on the economics of social preferences in markets. We leverage a unique opportunity to generate a large data set to inform the who's, what's, where's, and when's of social preferences through the...

Community targeting of vote payments — defined as the saturation of entire neighborhoods with cash prior to elections — is widespread in the developing world. In this paper, we utilize laboratory experiments conducted in the U.S. and Kenya to demonstrate that, relative to individual...

We model visibility bias in the social transmission of consumption behavior. When consumption is more salient than non-consumption, people perceive that others are consuming heavily, and infer that future prospects are favorable. This increases aggregate consumption in a positive feedback loop....

Although most of the political-economy literature blames inefficient policies on institutions or politicians' motives to supply bad policy, voters may themselves be partially responsible by demanding bad policy. In this paper, we posit that voters may systematically err when assessing potential...

We face a variety of potential catastrophes; nuclear or bioterrorism, a climate catastrophe, and a "mega-virus" are examples. Martin and Pindyck (AER 2015) showed that decisions to avert such catastrophes are interdependent, so that simple cost-benefit analysis breaks down. They assumed that...