Do we praise altruistic acts because they produce social benefits or because they entail a personal sacrifice? Across five studies, we find that people mainly rely on personal cost rather than social benefit when evaluating prosocial actors. This occurs because sacrifice, but not benefit, is...

School-based management programs aim to improve education outcomes by involving parents in allocation decisions about external funds transferred to the school. This paper explores the effects of two school-based management programs on parental investment in schools via voluntary contributions....

Procreation is the ultimate public goods problem. Each new child affects the welfare of many other people, and some children produce uncompensated value that future people will enjoy. This essay addresses challenges that arise if we think of procreation and parenting as public goods. These...

In response to the perceived quality of a public good, households may choose to incur averting expenditures as a substitute to its aggregate provision, thereby revealing an (inverse) demand function. When unobserved heterogeneity affects both perceived quality and averting behavior,...

Evidence from an experiment investigating the house money effect in the context of a public goods game is reconsidered. Analysis is performed within the framework of the panel hurdle model, in which subjects are assumed to be one of two types: free-riders, and potential contributors. The effect...

Physicians are supposed to serve patients' interests, but some are more inclined to do so than others. This paper studies how the system of health care provision affects the allocation of patients to physicians when physicians differ in altruism. We show that allowing for private provision of...

In social dilemmas, there is tension between cooperation that promotes the common good and the pursuit of individual interests. International climate change negotiations provide one example: although abatement costs are borne by individual countries, the benefits are shared globally. We study a...

We run a public good experiment in the field and in the lab with (partly) the same subjects. The field experiment is a true natural field experiment as subjects do not know that they are exposed to an experimental variation. We can show that subjects' behavior in the classic lab public good...

We develop and test a model of social comparison in which individuals gain status through pro-social behavior (competitive altruism) and in which they endogenously choose the reference group and associated reference standard involved in signaling status (reference group selection). In our...

We provide a direct test of the role of social preferences in voluntary cooperation. We elicit individuals' cooperation preference in one experiment and make a point prediction about the contribution to a repeated public good. This allows for a novel test as to whether there are "types" of...