How does overconfidence arise and how does it persist in the face of experience and feedback? In an experimental setting, we examine how individuals’ beliefs about their own performance on a quiz react to noisy, but unbiased feedback. In a control treatment, each participant expresses her...

Previous economic experiments on dual-process reasoning in altruistic decisions have yielded inconclusive results. However, these studies do not create a conflict between affective and cognitive motives, resulting in imperfect identification. We interact standard cognitive and affective...

Avoiding information about adverse welfare consequences of self-interested decisions, orstrategic ignorance, is an important source of corruption, anti-social behavior and even atrocities. We model an agent who cares about self-image and has the opportunity to learn the social benefits of a...

I investigate the relative importance of social-signaling versus self-signaling in driving giving. I derive specific qualitative predictions about how the response of an image-motivated dictator to a change in the probability that her choice will be implemented depends crucially on the...

How robust are social preferences to variations in the environment in which a decision is made? By varying the elicitation method and default choice in the `moral wiggle-room' game of Dana, Weber, and Kuang (2007), I examine the robustness and nature of the pattern of information avoidance in...

How does overconfidence arise and persist in the face of experience and feedback? We examine experimentally how individuals' beliefs about their absolute, as opposed to relative, performance on a quiz react to noisy, but unbiased, feedback. Participants believe themselves to have received...

Beyond the classical reasons of efficiency, commitment, the distribution of information, or incentive provision, a person may also delegate decision rights so as to avoid blame for an unpopular or immoral decision. We show that by delegating to an intermediary, a dictator facing an allocation...

Land can be inefficiently allocated when attempts to assemble separately-owned pieces of land into large parcels are frustrated by holdout landowners. The existing land-assembly institution of eminent domain can be used neither to gauge efficiency nor to determine how to compensate displaced...

We document a lower bound for thecontrol premium: agents' willingness to pay to control their own payoff. Participants choose between an asset that will pay only if they later answer a particular quiz question correctly and one that pays only if their partner answers a different question...