We investigate why people keep their promises in the absence of external enforcement mechanisms and reputational effects. In a controlled laboratory experiment we show that exogenous variation of second-order expectations (promisors' expectations about promisees' expectations that the promise...

This study evaluates people’s concerns for distributive fairness (equality of outcomes and payoffs to those worse-off) and reciprocal fairness (receiving what one is due based on one’s past actions) using dictator, ultimatum, and trust games. In the dictator games we classify individuals’...

Privacy law relies on the argument that consent does not entail any relevant impediments for the liberty of the consenting individual. Challenging this argument, we experimentally investigate whether consent to the publication of personal information in cyberspace entails self-coercion on a...

The social capital literature attributes association members a key role in propagating inter-personal trust in the society. It has been posited that participating in associations instils pro-social attitudes in their members, and that the decline in associational membership is the main cause of...

We investigate the effect of beliefs and preferences on trust and trustworthiness in the first experiment involving a stratified sample of association members and a demographically comparable sample of non-members. We show that: (1) Neither expectations on others’ behaviour nor risk aversion...

This paper provides a description and background information related to the experimental project on “Trust and trustworthiness in association members and in the society”. The main purpose of the project has been to test experimentally one of the main theses of the social capital literature,...

Is it possible to elicit reliable assessment from an assessor having a conflict of interest (e.g. a professor that writes a recommendation letter for a formal PhD student)? We propose an experimental test and show that compared to a not-incentivized assessment, a promise to give a truthful...

Is it possible to elicit reliable assessment from an assessor with conflict of interest (e.g. a professor that writes a recommendation letter for a formal PhD student)? We propose an experimental test and show that compared to a not-incentivized assessment, a promise to give a truthful...

Experimental evidence from dictator games and simple choice situations indicates concerns for fairness and social welfare in human decision making. At the same time, models of inequality averse agents fail to explain the experimental data of individuals who reduce their payoff below a fair split...

It is difficult to identify acts that are purely altruistic, and do not have some level of egoism or self-interest involved. By considering situations where team members seemingly have nothing to gain by the way they distribute points to others with regard to peer evaluation, and where their...