The success of a country's anti-corruption policies can crucially depend on the citizens' beliefs about the existing legal environment. We test this key idea of Basu (2020) using a novel design which systematically manipulates beliefs of participants in an experiment. Our results suggest that...

Does the procedure of entitlement affect fairness perceptions? We use a dictator game to study the question in mixed gender pairs. In our experiments, we vary the process of entitlement across treatments. Allocators in our dictator game can inherit an amount without any effort, earn an amount...

We use a simple trust-game to elicit trusting and trustworthy behavior among students majoring in economics and other disciplines. We also administer a Social Values Orientation (SVO) survey to evaluate any possible correlation between an individual's levels of trust indicated in the survey and...

The success of a country's anti-corruption policies can crucially depend on the citizens' beliefs about the existing legal environment. We test this key idea of Basu (2020) using a novel design which systematically manipulates beliefs of participants in an experiment. Our results suggest that...

This paper uses variations in a popular parlor game to provide useful instructional benefits. The paper builds a classroom activity to nudge students towards thinking in a backward-inductive manner. The pedagogic innovation is in introducing the game repeatedly with progressively smaller action...

Both theory and recent empirical evidence on nudging suggest that observability of behavior acts as an instrument for promoting (discouraging) pro-social (anti-social) behavior. Our study questions the universality of these claims. We employ a novel four-party setup to disentangle the roles that...

We experimentally investigate whether individuals strategically distort their beliefs about dominant norms. Embedded in the context of lying, we systematically vary both the nature of elicited beliefs (descriptive about what others do, or normative about what others approve of) and whether...

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...

A stream of research examining the effect of punishment on conformity indicates that punishment can backfire and lead to suboptimal social outcomes. In such studies, the enforcement of a behavioral rule to cooperate originates from a single party. This feature may raise concern about the...