A growing economic literature stresses the importance of relative comparisons, e.g., for savings and consumption or happiness. In this literature it is usually assumed that reference standards against which people compare themselves are exogenously given. In contrast findings from social...

The paper extends the standard tax evasion model by allowing for social interactions. In Manski?s (1993) nomenclature, our model takes into account social conformity effects (i.e., endogenous interactions), fairness effects (i.e., exogenous interactions) and sorting effects (i.e., correlated...

We present an economic experiment on network formation, in which subjects can decide to form links to one another. Direct links are costly but being connected is valuable. The gametheoretic basis for our experiment is the model of Bala and Goyal (2000). They distinguish between two scenarios...

Most research in economics models agents somehow motivated by out-comes. Here, we model agents motivated by procedures instead, whereprocedures are dened independently of an outcome. To that end, wedesign procedures which yield the same expected outcomes or carry thesame information on other's...

The measurement of social norms plays a pivotal role in many social sciences. While economists predominantly conduct experiments, sociologists rather employ (factorial) surveys. Both methods, however, suffer from distinct weaknesses. Experiments, on the one hand, often fall short in the...

Most research in economics models agents somehow motivated by outcomes. Here, we model agents motivated by procedures instead, where procedures are defined independently of an outcome. To that end, we design procedures which yield the same expected outcomes or carry the same information on...

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...

This paper reports the results of an experimental investigation which allows a deeper insight into the nature of social preferences amongst organized criminals and how these differ from "ordinary" criminals on the one hand and from the non‐criminal population in the same geographical area on...

Trust is a concept that has attracted significant attention in economic theory and research within the last two decades: it has been applied in a number of contexts and has been investigated both as an explanatory and as a dependent variable. In this paper, we explore the questions of what...

Trust is a concept that has attracted - significant attention in economic theory and research within the last two decades: it has been applied in a number of contexts and has been investigated both as an explanatory and as a dependent variable. In this paper, we explore the questions of what...