People use moral wiggle room to behave selfish. But does a narrow wiggle room necessarily produce better social outcomes? When people disagree on normative goals, economic theories of self-image predict that narrowing the moral wiggle room will make choices not only less selfish but also even...

People frequently behave non-selfishly in situations where they can reduce their own payoff to help others. It is typically assumed that such pro-social behavior arises because people are motivated by a social preference. An alternative explanation is that they follow a social norm. We test with...

Using a unique experimental data set, we investigate how asymmetric legal rights shape bargainers’ aspiration levels through moral entitlements derived from equity norms and number prominence. Aspiration formation is typically hard to observe in real life. Our study involves 15 negotiations...

We consider a two-person Cournot game of voluntary contributions to a public good with identical individual preferences, and examine equilibrium aggregate welfare under a separable, symmetric and concave social welfare function. Assuming the public good is pure, Itaya, de Meza and Myles (Econ....

This paper provides a survey of recent experimental work in economics focusing on social and economic networks. The experiments consider networks of coordination and cooperation, buyer-seller networks, and network formation

By extending the traditional trust game to settings involving more than one trustee, we study how restricting information flow between trustees influences trust and reciprocity. We start with a theoretical investigation and then report the results of two experiments designed to examine investor...

We provide a systematic comparison of punishment from unaffected third parties and affected second parties using a within-subject design in ten simple games. We apply the classification analysis by El-Gamal and Grether (1995) and find that a parsimonious model assuming subjects are either...

We consider a two-person Cournot game of voluntary contributions to a public good with identical individual preferences, and examine equilibrium aggregate welfare under a separable, symmetric and concave social welfare function. Assuming the public good is pure, Itaya, de Meza and Myles (Econ....

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...

We develop a dynamic resource extraction game that mimics the global multi-generation planning problem for climate change and fossil fuel extraction. We implement the game under different conditions in the laboratory. Compared to a "libertarian" baseline condition, we find that policy...