We study the impact of cognitive load in dictator games to test two conflicting views of moral behavior. Are social preferences skindeep in the sense that they are the result of humans’ cognitive reasoning while the natural instinct is selfish, or is rather the natural instinct to share fairly...

Empirical evidence suggests that people’s maximum willingness to pay for having a good is often substantially lower than their minimum willingness to accept not having it, and that this discrepancy tends to be especially large when valuing public goods. This paper hypothesizes that differences...

This paper examines the attitude towards relative position or status among rural households in Vietnam. On average, the respondents show weaker preferences for relative position than in comparable studies in Western countries. Possible explanations are the emphasis on the importance of equality...

We find, using survey-experimental methods, that most individuals are concerned with both relative income and relative consumption of particular goods. The degree of concern varies in the expected direction depending on the properties of the good. However, contrary to what has been suggested in...

While many earlier studies have found that people’s maximum willingness to pay for having a good is often substantially lower than their minimum willingness to accept not having it, more recent experimental evidence suggests that this discrepancy vanishes for standard consumption goods when an...

Empirical as well as experimental evidence strongly suggests that bidders in common value auctions typically do not conform to the requirements of perfect rationality. Eyster and Rabin (2005) develop a theory and an equilibrium concept - x-cursed equilibrium - for bounded rational bidding in...

In this paper we first critically review conventional environmental economics. We conclude that the standard theory offers too narrow a perspective for many real world problems and that many theories are not empirically tested. Consequently, environmental economics is at risk of producing...

This paper investigates the relationship between various market imperfections and the skill premium. The model in this paper assumes perfectly competitive labor markets but distorted product and financial markets. The model predicts that the skill premium is positively correlated with market...

bel and Eberly (1999) show that the effect of uncertainty on long run capital accumulation is ambiguous in a real options model with irreversible investment. We show that a higher level of uncertainty tends to reduce expected capital stock levels in a model with strictly convex adjustment costs....