We examine whether belief-based preferences - caring about what transgressors believe - play a crucial role in punishment decisions: Do punishers want to make sure that transgressors understand why they are being punished, and is this desire to affect beliefs often prioritized over distributive...

We examine whether belief-based preferences - caring about what transgressors believe - play a crucial role in punishment decisions: Do punishers want to make sure that transgressors understand why they are being punished, and is this desire to affect beliefs often prioritized over distributive...

The two most prevalent theories of why people punish others—retribution and deterrence—focus exclusively on outcomes: the objective material welfare and the subjective well-being of the offender and the punisher. However, many if not most acts of revenge seem to be oriented not so much...

We propose and experimentally test a new theory of information seeking and avoidance. Beyond the conventional desire for information as an input to decision making, people are driven by curiosity, which is a desire to fill information gaps, even in the absence of material benefits. People are...

In this chapter we summarize how economists conceptualize beliefs. Moving both backward and forward in time, we review the way that mainstream economics currently deals with beliefs, as well as, briefly, the history of economists’ thinking about beliefs. Most importantly, we introduce the...

Organizations strive to encourage curiosity, seeking employees who are open to asking questions and intrinsically motivated to find answers, i.e., who display curiosity traits. We argue that situational determinants are stronger predictors of information-seeking behaviors than traits....

Going to the gym is likely to be judged more positively if it is known that the gym-goer is vaccinated against COVID-19 than unvaccinated. We investigate how people make sense of vaccination-contingent behaviors --- behaviors, such as going to the gym or a bar, which are judged differently...