An extant debate in the morality literature centers on whether honesty is a stable and generalizable trait or whether honest behavior in one situation is independent from honest behavior in another situation. However, a third possibility is that tendencies toward dishonesty vary according to...

This paper experimentally examines image motivation the desire to be liked and well-regarded by others as a driver in prosocial behavior (doing good), and asks whether extrinsic monetary incentives (doing well) have a detrimental effect on prosocial behavior due to crowding out of image...

By running an experiment among Germans collecting their passports or ID cards in the citizen centers of Berlin, we find that individuals with an East German family background cheat significantly more on an abstract task than those with a West German family background. The longer individuals were...

A great deal of late bidding has been observed on internet auctions such as eBay, which employ a second price auction with a fixed deadline. Much less late bidding has been observed on internet auctions such as those run by Amazon, which employ similar auction rules, but use an ending rule that...

When faced with a choice of selecting one of several available products (or possibly buying nothing), a standard theoretical perspective suggests that the option with the highest benefitcost difference will be chosen. This analysis applies to all prices including the price of zero. In contrast,...

This paper examines image motivationthe desire to be liked and well-regarded by others as a driver in prosocial behavior (doing good), and asks whether extrinsic monetary incentives (doing well) have a detrimental effect on prosocial behavior due to crowding out of image motivation. By...

Most upper-management and sales force personnel, as well as workers in many other jobs, are paid based on performance, which is widely perceived as motivating effort and enhancing productivity relative to non-contingent pay schemes. However, psychological research suggests that excessive rewards...

This paper challenges the common assumption that economic agents know their tastes. After reviewing previous research showing that valuation of ordinary products and experiences can be manipulated by non-normative cues, we present three studies showing that in some cases people do not even have...

Dishonest acts are all too prevalent in day-to-day life. In the current review, we examine some possible psychological causes for such dishonesty that go beyond the standard economic considerations of probability and value of external payoffs. We propose a general model of dishonest behavior...

This paper experimentally examines whether looking at other people´s pricing decisions is a type of heuristic - a decisionmaking rule - that people use even when it is not applicable, as in the case of clearly private value goods. We find evidence that this indeed is the case - an individual´s...