This article examines whether there are social influences on the decisions made by individuals about whether to trust others -- relative strangers -- in their respective societies. There are two possible types of social influences on the trust decision: first, contextual or exogenous social...

In the literature of psychology and economics it is frequently observed that individuals tend to conform in their behavior to that of similar individuals. A fundamental question is whether the outcome of such conformity can be consistent with self-interest. We propose that this consistency...

We contrast and compare three ways of predicting efficiency in a forced contribution threshold public good game. The three alternatives are based on ordinal potential, quantal response and impulse balance theory. We report an experiment designed to test the respective predictions and find that...

Many fundraisers report donations using categories such as more than £ 1000, more than £ 10,000 etc. One naturally wonders how we should categorise donations and whether category reporting can raise more funds than simple uncategorised reporting. To shed light on these questions, we employ a...

In a signalling model of conformity, we demonstrate that naïve observers, those that take actions at face value, constrain the set of actions that can possibly be social norms. With rational observers many actions can be norms, but with naïve observers only actions close to that preferred by...

We argue that the intensity of competition within a group or organization can have an important influence on whether or not people cheat. To make this point we first work through a simple model of strategic misreporting in the workplace. For low and high levels of competition we show that, in...