We examine whether belief-based preferences - caring about what transgressors believe - play a crucial role in punishment decisions: Do punishers want to make sure that transgressors understand why they are being punished, and is this desire to affect beliefs often prioritized over distributive...

We propose and experimentally test a new theory of information seeking and avoidance. Beyond the conventional desire for information as an input to decision making, people are driven by curiosity, which is a desire to fill information gaps, even in the absence of material benefits. People are...

We examine whether belief-based preferences - caring about what transgressors believe - play a crucial role in punishment decisions: Do punishers want to make sure that transgressors understand why they are being punished, and is this desire to affect beliefs often prioritized over distributive...

The two most prevalent theories of why people punish others—retribution and deterrence—focus exclusively on outcomes: the objective material welfare and the subjective well-being of the offender and the punisher. However, many if not most acts of revenge seem to be oriented not so much...

In this chapter we summarize how economists conceptualize beliefs. Moving both backward and forward in time, we review the way that mainstream economics currently deals with beliefs, as well as, briefly, the history of economists’ thinking about beliefs. Most importantly, we introduce the...

We propose an alternative account to the conventional theory of belief homophily--that people have an intrinsic distaste for encountering differences in beliefs. We argue that when people face others who hold beliefs different from their own, they do not find these encounters disturbing because...