There is a longstanding concern that material rewards might undermine pro-social motivations, thereby leading to a decrease in blood donations. This paper provides an empirical test of how material rewards affect blood donations in a three-month large-scale field experiment and a fifteen-month...

Companies spend billions of dollars online for paid links to branded search terms. Measuring the effectiveness of this marketing spending is hard. Blake, Nosko and Tadelis (2015) ran an experiment with eBay, showing that when the company suspended paid search, most of the traffic still ended up...

Evidence from psychology and economics indicates that many individuals overestimate their ability, both absolutely and relatively. We test three different theories about observed relative overconfidence. The first theory notes that simple statistical comparisons (for example, whether the...

Economists and psychologists have devised numerous instruments to measure time preferences and have generated a rich literature examining the extent to which time preferences predict important outcomes; however, we still do not know which measures work best. With the help of a large sample of...

Does social recognition motivate prosocial individuals? We run large-scale experiments at Italy's main blood donors association, testing social recognition in social media and peer groups. We experimentally disentangle visibility concerns and peer comparisons, and study how exposure to different...

We compare the behavior and welfare effects of two popular interventions for resource conservation. The first intervention is social comparison reports (SC), which primarily provide consumers with information motivating behavioral change. The second intervention is real-time feedback (RTF),...

There is by now ample evidence from laboratory experiments that individuals exhibit "prosocial" or "other-regarding" preferences. However, a key question is whether the importance of other-regarding preferences documented in the laboratory can be readily generalized to draw conclusions about the...