Many economic decisions are made jointly within households. This raises the question about spouses? relative influence on joint decisions and the determinants of relative influence. Using a controlled experiment (on inter-temporal choice), we let each spouse first make individual decisions and...

Earlier research has shown that using a default option has a decisive effect on individuals’ choices. In many cases, however, the low proportion of subjects who switch from the pre-set default option might partly explained by inexperience with the goods or services offered, and high...

Land conflicts in developing countries are costly. An important policy goal is to create respect for borders. This often involves mandatory, expensive interventions. We propose a new policy design, which in theory promotes neighborly relations at low cost. A salient feature is the option to...

We use a natural field experiment to investigate the hypothesis that generosity is partly involuntary, by examining whether individuals tend to avoid opportunities to act generously. In Sweden, new recycling machines for bottles and cans with an option of donating the returned deposit to charity...

We use a natural field experiment to investigate the hypothesis that generosity is partly involuntary, by examining whether individuals tend to avoid opportunities to act generously. In Sweden, new recycling machines for bottles and cans with an option of donating the returned deposit to charity...

Levels of trust are measured by asking standard survey questions on trust and by observing behavior in a trust game using a random sample in rural Bangladesh. Follow-up questions and correlations between stated expectations and the amount sent in the trust game reveal that the amount sent is...

We add a gift in appreciation of the subject’s contribution to a social reference treatment successfully proven to trigger higher donations, and find that the share of people contributing decreases significantly, thereby eroding the original treatment’s capacity to increase donations.

We examine situations in which a decision maker decides for another person as well as herself under conditions of payoff equality, and compare such decisions under responsibility to individual decisions. Estimating a structural model we find that responsibility leaves utility curvature...

When designing choice experiments for nonmarket valuation the role of the price attribute is of major importance. In the energy sector the uncertainty of future direction of changes in prices makes it difficult to include an adequate price vector in the design. We separately investigate the...

Many economic decisions are made jointly within households. Running an experiment on intertemporal choice, we investigate the relative influence of spouses on joint household decisions. We let each spouse first decide individually and then jointly with the other spouse. We propose the use of a...