Ostracism, or exclusion by peers, has been practiced since ancient times as a severe form of punishment against transgressors of laws or social norms. The purpose of this paper is to offer a comprehensive analysis on how ostracism affects behavior and the functioning of a social group. We...

This paper investigates whether distributional conflicts become more likely when groups are involved in the fight. We present results from a laboratory experiment in which two parties can appropriate resources via a contest or, alternatively, take an outside option. Keeping monetary gains...

In hierarchical organizations the role of a team leader often requires making decisions which do not necessarily coincide with the majority opinion of the team. However, these decisions are final and binding for all team members. We study experimentally why, and under which conditions, leaders...

Does market interaction influence morality? We study a particular angle of this classic question theoretically and experimentally. The novelty of our approach is to posit that people are motivated by reciprocity; an urge many argued affects humans. We scrutinize how this shapes interaction in...

Interrelated global crises - climate change, pandemics, loss of ecosystem services and biodiversity - pose risks that demand collective solutions. Uncertainty about others' behavior, coupled with the dependence on some to take collective efforts to mitigate risks for all (e.g. conservation of...

Financial misbehavior is widespread and costly. The Dutch government legally requires every employee in the financial sector to take a Hippocratic oath, the so-called "banker's oath." We investigate whether nudges that (in)directly remind financial advisers of their oath affect their service. In...

We study experimentally the protection of property in five widely distinct countries-Austria, Mexico, Mongolia, South Korea and the United States. Our main results are that the security of property varies with experimental institutions, and that our subject pools exhibit significantly different...

In laboratory experiments we explore the effects of communication and group decision making on investment behavior and on subjects' proneness to behavioral biases. Most importantly, we show that communication and group decision making does not impact subjects' overall proneness to biases like...

We study the influence of gender and gender pairing on economic decision making in an experimental two-person bargaining game where the other party's gender is known to both actors. We find that (1) gender per se has no significant effect on behavior, whereas (2) gender pairing systematically...

The paper reports an experimental study based on a variant of the popular Chinos game, which is used as a simple but paradigmatic instance of observational learning. There are three players, arranged in sequence, each of whom wins a fixed price if she manages to guess the total number of coins...