Temptation and self-control in intertemporal choice environments are receiving increasing attention in the theoretical economics literature. Nevertheless, there remains a scarcity of empirical evidence from controlled environments informing behavior under repeated temptations. This is...

Does transparent leadership promote cooperative groups? We address this issue using a public goods experiment with exogenously selected leaders who are able to send non-binding contribution suggestions to the group. To investigate the effect of transparency in this setting we vary the ease with...

We develop and model a two-stage incentivized intervention to promote pro-sociality. In the first stage, participants are incentivized to complete a compound task consisting of a targeted pro-social activity and a complement activity. In the second stage, participants are incentivized to...

Does transparent leadership promote cooperative groups? We address this issue using a public goods experiment with exogenously selected leaders who are able to send non-binding contribution suggestions to the group. To investigate the effect of transparency in this setting we vary the ease with...

Temptation and self-control in intertemporal choice environments are receiving increasing attention in the theoretical economics literature. Nevertheless, there remains a scarcity of empirical evidence from controlled environments informing behavior under repeated temptations. This is...

Development of human societies requires cooperation among unrelated individuals and obedience to social norms. Although punishment is widely agreed to be potentially useful in fostering cooperation, many recent results in psychology and economics highlight punishments' failures in this regard....

Sanctions are used ubiquitously to enforce obedience to social norms. Recent field studies and laboratory experiments have demonstrated, however, that cooperation is sometimes reduced when incentives meant to promote pro-social decisions are added to the environment. Although a variety of...

Evolutionary theory reveals that punishment is effective in promoting cooperation and maintaining social norms. Although it is accepted that emotions are connected to punishment decisions, there remains substantial debate over why humans use costly punishment. Here we show experimentally that...

The millions of deaths that occurred during China's great famine of 1959-1961 were the result of one of the world's greatest civil demographic disasters. Two primary hypotheses have been advanced to explain the famine. One is that China experienced three consecutive years of bad weather while...