Sharing a common fate with some people but not others may affect how economic agents behave in economic transactions, quite independently of strategic incentives. We present an experimental test of the effect of perceptions of common fate in bargaining games. No discrimination was found in a...

This note paper considers briefly whether dictator games are a good tool to measure altruism. The answer is negative: behavior in dictator games is seriously confounded by what I shall label experimenter demand effects. Section 2 briefly defines dictator games and reviews some of its purported...

As a stress test of experimenter demand effects, we run an experiment where subjects can physically destroy coupons awarded to them. About one subject out of three does. Giving money back to the experimenter is possible in a separate task but is more consistent with an experimenter demand effect...

Sharing a common fate with some people but not others may affect how economic agents behave within firms and organizations. Recognizing that many bilateral transactions occur both within and between groups sharing some degree of common fate, we present an experimental test of the effect of...

Economists traditionally model choice as the maximization of a stable utility function. A simple way of modeling envy (though not the only one) is by adding a term which is a negative function of the consumption of the other agent(s) in one's own utility function. This paper briefly reviews some...

In an experiment on markets for services, we find that consumers are likely to stick to defaults and achieve suboptimal outcomes. We unpack two key psychological reasons why they do this - complexity (in terms of non-linearity, number and bundling of tariffs) and consumer inattention. The...

Trust responsiveness is the tendency to fulfill trust because you believe that it has been placed on you. The experiment presented in this paper uses two simple trust games to measure directly or indirectly the robustness of trust responsiveness in three conditions: When beliefs are elicited and...

Vendettas occur in many real world settings where rivals compete for a prize, e.g., winning an election or a competitive promotion, by engaging in retaliatory aggressive behavior. We present a benchmark experiment where two players have an initial probability of winning a prize. Retaliatory...