Anecdotal, empirical, and experimental evidence suggests that offering extrinsic rewards for certain activities can reduce people's willingness to engage in those activities voluntarily. We propose a simple rationale for this "crowding out" phenomenon, using standard economic arguments. The...

Emile Durkheim said that when all of the members of a tribe or clan come together, they can sanctify the sacred and experience a spiritual “effervescence.” Friedrich Hayek suggested that certain genes and instincts still dispose us toward the ethos and mentality of the hunter-gatherer band,...

We estimate responsibility-sensitive welfare weights for health that facilitate inequalityand inequity-sensitive policy evaluation. In a UK general population sample, 569 online experiment participants distribute constrained resources to determine the health of hypothetical individuals...

Preventing overfishing at Lake Victoria is a typical situation where policies have to rely on norm-based interventions to improve outcomes. Our lab-in-the-field experiment studies how information about high or low levels of previous cooperation affects the creation of social norms in a...

Most people tend to equate success with merit, a tendency that is particularly pronounced among conservatives. However, in practice it is exceedingly difficult to discern the relative impact of luck and effort to economic success. Based on a large-scale online study that samples the general US...