Economic theory suggests that the deterrence of deviant behavior is driven by a combination of severity and certainty of punishment. This paper presents the first controlled experiment to study a third important factor that has been mainly overlooked: the swiftness of formal sanctions. We...

Prenatal androgens have organizational effects on brain and endocrine system development, which may have a partial impact on economic decisions. Numerous studies have investigated the relationship between prenatal testosterone and financial risk taking, yet results remain inconclusive. We...

Standard economic theory assumes that individual risk taking decisions are independent from the social context. Recent experimental evidence however shows that the income of peers has a systematic impact on observed degrees of risk aversion. In particular, subjects strive for balance in the...

This paper presents a model for the "gambling effect," i.e., the effect that risky gambles are evaluated differently than riskless outcomes due to an intrinsic utility (or disutility) of gambling.The model turns out to violate stochastic dominance and therefore its primary applications will be...