Policies and explicit private incentives designed for self-regarding individuals sometimes are less effective or even counterproductive when they diminish altruism, ethical norms and other social preferences. Evidence from 51 experimental studies indicates that this crowding out effect is...

For decades, experimental economics has been very interested in behavior that could be characterized as practicing solidarity (although the term is rarely used). Solidarity is a key concept in Catholic Social Teaching. This paper builds a bridge between these two endeavors that, thus far, had...

We review the theory of fairness as it pertains to concretely specified problems of resource allocations. We present punctual notions designed to evaluate how well individuals, or groups, are treated in relation to one another: no-envy, egalitarian-equivalence, individual and collective lower or...

Conditional cooperation is an important factor in voluntary cooperation. Fehr and Schmidt (1999) show that in public good games conditional cooperation among rational players is feasible if cooperators are sufficiently inequality averse and if there are not too many free riders. The derived...

Paying it forward" is a behavior in which people help someone else because they were helped in the past. Although experimental evidence exists that indicates that real human beings often "pay-it-forward" even in the face of free-rider risks, the theoretical basis for the evolution of this...

This paper studies the impact of inequity aversion preferences (Fehr and Schmidt, 1999) in a "repeated" public goods game. We assume that agents care about the expected payoff differences among themselves over all periods of a game, so that it is in fact a dynamic game that is being played. In...

Evidence of gender differences in cooperation in social dilemmas is inconclusive. This paper experimentally elicits unconditional contributions, a contribution vector (cooperative preferences), and beliefs about the level of others' contributions in variants of the public goods game. We show...