Presentation at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Conference: “Implications of Behavioral Economics for Economic Policy”, Boston, Massachusetts, September 28, 2007

Monetary incentives are often considered as a way to foster contributions to public goods in society and firms. This paper investigates experimentally the effect of monetary incentives in the presence of a norm enforcement mechanism. Norm enforcement through peer punishment has been shown to be...

This paper describes the contract design and institutional features of an innovative rainfall insurance policy offered to smallholder farmers in rural India and presents preliminary evidence on the determinants of insurance participation. Insurance take-up is found to be decreasing in basis risk...

In this paper, we infer motives for trade initiation from market sidedness. We define trading as more two-sided (one-sided) if the correlation between the numbers of buyer- and seller-initiated trades increases (decreases), and assess changes in sidedness (relative to a control sample) around...

Social interdependence is believed to play an important role in how people make individual choices. This paper presents a simple model constructed on the premise that people are motivated by their own payoff as well as by how their actions compare with those of other people in their reference...

We combine information on social networks with medical records and survey data in order to examine how friends affect one’s decision to get vaccinated against the flu. The random assignment of undergraduates to residential halls at a large private university allows us to estimate how peer...

This paper 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 motivation. ; By...

In this paper, we propose a decision framework where people are individually asked to either actively consent to or dissent from some pro-social behavior. We hypothesize that confronting individuals with the choice of whether to engage in a specific pro-social behavior contributes to the...

There is a longstanding concern that material incentives might undermine prosocial motivation, leading to a decrease in blood donations rather than an increase. This paper provides an empirical test of how material incentives affect blood donations in a large-scale field experiment spanning...

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