In this paper, we hypothesize that the strength of the consensus effect, i.e., the tendency for people to overweight the prevalence of their own values and preferences when forming beliefs about others' values and preferences, depends on the salience of own preferences. We manipulate salience by...

In this study, we investigate how and why people discriminate among different groups, including their own groups and multiple out-groups. In a laboratory experiment, we use dictator games for five groups to compare actual transfers to in-group and out-group agents with the respective beliefs...

We use the trust and the dictator games to explore the effects of religious identity on trust, trustworthiness, prosociality, and conditional reciprocity within a beliefs-based model. We provide a novel and rigorous theoretical model to derive the relevant predictions, which are then tested in...

We use the trust and the dictator games to explore the effects of religious identity on trust, trustworthiness, prosociality, and conditional reciprocity within a beliefs-based model. We provide a novel and rigorous theoretical model to derive the relevant predictions, which are then tested in...

We analyze subjects' eye movements while they make decisions in a series of one-shot games. The majority of them perform a partial and selective analysis of the payoff matrix, often ignoring the payoffs of the opponent and/or paying attention only to specific cells. Our results suggest that...

Elicitation procedures (e.g., choice, valuation, matching, joint/separate evaluation) may generate reversed preferences between alternatives. Yet procedure-dependent preferences can be endogenous. When attribute importance is imperfectly known, people can engage in costly information...

We use a range of dictator game experiments to investigate whether people avoid information altruistically. After learning about a product with positive externalities, a consumer may avoid learning the cost of the product so that she does not hesitate to act altruistically. We find that although...

Economists and management scholars have argued that the scope of incentives to increase cooperation in organizations is limited as their use signals the prevalence of free-riding among employees. This paper tests this hypothesis experimentally, using a sample of managers and employees from a...

This paper demonstrates the importance of simultaneously considering two behavioral biases, correlation neglect and overprecision, in characterizing belief formation. Our laboratory experiments reveal that, relative to independent signals, subjects overvalue moderately or strongly correlated...

We study belief updating about relative performance in an ego-relevant task. Manipulating the perceived ego-relevance of the task, we show that subjects update their beliefs optimistically because they derive direct utility flows from holding positive beliefs. This finding provides a behavioral...