Promises often foster trust and cooperation. A recent literature explores why. Two explanations have been proposed, and experimental tests provided some support and some controversy:- Charness & Dufwenberg (2006) (C&D) propose an expectation-based explanation (EBE). People are guilt averse (GA):...

We explore gender differences in how people are motivated. We focus on guilt aversion, a surprisingly relatively unexplored issue. Our experiment supports the idea that men are more guilt averse than women. We provide a potential intuition for our findings based on the pregnancy-related...