How does the environment of an organization influence whether workers voluntarily provide effort? We study the power relationship between a non-profit unit (e.g. university department, NGO, health trust), where workers care about the result of their work, and a bu- reaucrat, who supplies some...

Signaling models of esteem have implications for peer pressure. Using Bénabou's and Tirole's "honor-stigma" model, we analyze how the pressure to engage in costly signaling changes with the distribution of peers' attributes. In particular, we provide novel comparative statics on the effects of...

We study the relationship between inequality and social instability. While the argument that inequality can be damaging for the cohesion of a society is well established, the empirical evidence is mixed. We use a novel approach to isolate the causal relationship running from inequality to social...

We experimentally investigate whether individuals strategically distort their beliefs about dominant norms. Embedded in the context of lying, we systematically vary both the nature of elicited beliefs (descriptive about what others do, or normative about what others approve of) and whether...

We formally explore the idea that punishment of norm-breakers may be a vehicle for the older generation to teach youngsters about social norms. We show that this signaling role provides sufficient incentives to sustain costly punishing behavior. People punish norm-breakers to pass information...

We use a simple cost-benefit analysis to derive optimal similarity judgments - addressing the question: when should we expect a decision maker to distinguish between different time periods or different prizes? Our key premise is that cognitive resources are costly and are to be deployed only...

This paper focuses on belief distortion in the context of lying decisions. We employ a twostage variant of the "dice under the cup" paradigm, in which subjects' beliefs are elicited in stage 1 before performing the dice task in stage 2. In stage 1, we elicit the subjects' beliefs about (i)...

We document a sharp increase in hate crime in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. We show that this rise was more pronounced in more pro-remain areas. These facts are consistent with a model in which individual behavior is dictated by a desire to conform to imperfectly observable social...

In a setting where inequality is ingrained and largely unavoidable (battle of the sexes), we investigate whether subjects condition their behaviour on the gender of their co-player. In order to identify the role of culture and gender norms, we run the experiment in two countries, Norway and...

Descriptive norms - the behavior of other individuals in one's reference group - play a key role in shaping individual decisions. When characterizing the behavior of others, a standard approach in the literature is to focus on average behavior. In this paper, we argue both theoretically and...