We develop and model a two-stage incentivized intervention to promote pro-sociality. In the first stage, participants are incentivized to complete a compound task consisting of a targeted pro-social activity and a complement activity. In the second stage, participants are incentivized to...

Does transparent leadership promote cooperative groups? We address this issue using a public goods experiment with exogenously selected leaders who are able to send non-binding contribution suggestions to the group. To investigate the effect of transparency in this setting we vary the ease with...

Inequality aversion is a key motive for punishment, with many prominent studies suggesting people use punishment to reduce or eliminate inequality. Punishment in laboratory games, however, is nearly always designed to promote equality (e.g., rejections in standard ultimatum games) and the...

Research in economics and psychology has established that informal sanctions,particularly expressions of negative emotion, can enforce fair economic exchange. However, scholars are only beginning to understand the reasons informal sanctions affect economic outcomes. Here we provide direct...

Although economic and social relationships can involve deception (Gneezy 2005), such relationships are often governed by informal contracts that require trust (Berg et al. 1995). While important advances have been made concerning deception in economics, the research has focused little on written...

Recent research suggests that while there are negative effects of betrayal aversion, that the presence of betrayal-averse agents is beneficial in reducing trusteesÕ willingness to betray trust. If true, then many common knowledge institutions may have adopted institutional rules and features...

We report data from a laboratory experiment demonstrating that cheating is significantly deterred when a possible intent to cheat must be revealed before, rather than after, a potentially dishonest act. Further, data from independent evaluators suggests a reason: the same action is more likely...

The literature on pro-social behavior shows that older children are more generous than younger children; however, the level of individual generosity is heterogeneous even between children of the same age. This paper investigates whether a child’s popularity affects a child’s...

This is the first paper to test the asset pricing implication of leverage in a laboratory. We show that as theory predicts, leverage increases asset prices: when an asset can be used as collateral (i.e., when the asset can be bought on margin), its price goes up. This increase is significant,...

Using a field experiment in China, we study whether migration status is correlated with attitudes toward risk, ambiguity, and competitiveness. Our subjects include migrants and non-migrants. We find that, migrants exhibit no differences from non-migrants in risk and ambiguity preferences...