We introduce opportunities for pre-play communication and to enter binding or non-binding contracts in trust games, and find (a) communication increases trusting and trustworthiness, (b) contracts are unnecessary for trusting and trustworthy behaviors and are eschewed by many players, (c) more...

We suggest a simple asset market model in which we analyze competitive and strategic behavior simultaneously. If two-fund separation is found to hold across periods for competitive behavior, it also holds for strategic behavior. In this case the relative prices of the assets do not depend on...

Anonymous application procedures (AAP) are increasingly promoted as a way to combat employment discrimination. The idea gets support from theory and experimental evidence, but virtually nothing is known about its real-life effects. We present empirical evidence building on micro data collected...

To put an economy on an equitable growth path, economic development must be based on social efficiency, equity, and job creation. It has been shown that unemployment has far-reaching effects, all leading to an inequitable distribution of well-being. But many economists assume that unemployment...

Fiscal policy is useful as a government instrument for supporting the economy, contributing to an increase in employment, and reducing inequality through more egalitarian income distribution. Over the past 30 years, developing countries have failed to increase their real wages due to the lack of...

The literature on public employment policies such as the job guarantee (JG) and the employer of last resort (ELR) often emphasizes their macroeconomic stabilization effects. But carefully designed and implemented policies like these can also have profound social transformative effects. In...

The probability of income loss depends on talent and effort. Effort has positive externalities and therefore individuals are proportion to their perceived diligence. The social norm requires more effort from individuals perceived as more talented, but talent is private information and...

I explore the effects of a preference for fairness in the division of housework between two spouses in two different models of household time allocation. Both in the model with agreeing spouses and the model with noncooperative spouses, such a preference has an equalising effect on the division...

This paper establishes reserve price as an ethical necessity contrary to its popular interpretation as an instrument of revenue generation. It provides an axiomatic justification to reserve pricing at Vickrey auction in single as well as multiple objects settings. It also provides a multi-object...

How malleable are people's fairness ideals? Although fairness is an oft-invoked concept in allocation situations, it is still unclear whether and to what extent people's allocations reflect their fairness ideals. We investigate in a laboratory experiment whether people's fairness ideals vary...