Both theory and recent empirical evidence on nudging suggest that observability of behavior acts as an instrument for promoting (discouraging) pro-social (anti-social) behavior. We connect three streams of literature (nudging, social preferences, and social norms) to investigate the universality...

Across four studies, including one involving an actual monetary decision, the authors demonstrate that forming a product consideration set by excluding versus including alternatives induces consumers to place more weight on ethical attributes, such as company labor practices and animal testing....

Many believe that consumer-sourced reputational information about products would increasingly replace top-down regulation. Instead of protecting consumers through coercive laws, reputational information gleaned from the wisdom of the crowd would guide consumer decision making. There is now a...

Today’s world faces many challenges that may be solved by using the principles of bioeconomy. Bioeconomy has had a multi-disciplinary approach with the objective of an integrated scope, namely, to achieve sustainable development. In a knowledge-based economy, the link between sustainable...

Expenditure visibility—the extent to which a household's spending on a consumption category is noticeable to others—is measured in three new surveys, with ~3,000 telephone and online respondents. Visibility shows little change across time (ten years) and survey methods. Four different...

In this online replication study we investigate if the pain of paying in cash – as opposed to paying by cards – can curb impulsive urges to purchase unhealthy or ‘vice' products. This effect was found by Thomas et al (2011) when comparing the payment instruments cash and credit card. We...

Many individuals have empathetic feelings towards animals but frequently consume meat. We investigate this "meat paradox" using insights from the literature on motivated reasoning in moral dilemmata. We develop a model where individuals form self-serving beliefs about the suffering of animals...

The concept of "luxury beliefs" has gained increasing attention in recent months. It captures the idea that, as status goods become more affordable, ideology has emerged as a new way to signal status. I use a signaling game to derive a prediction related to the concept: given some beliefs are...

As much as forty percent of social media users have been harassed online, but there is scarce causal evidence of how toxic content impacts user engagement and whether it is contagious. In a pre-registered field experiment, we recruited participants to install a browser extension, and randomly...