This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

Does cooperating require the inhibition of selfish urges? Or does “rational” self-interest constrain cooperative impulses? I investigated the role of intuition and deliberation in cooperation by meta-analyzing 67 studies in which cognitive-processing manipulations were applied to economic...

The excessive compensation packages of CEOs of U.S. corporations in recent years have brought the issue of fairness to the foreground in economics. The conventional wisdom is that the free market for labor, which determines the pay packages, cares only about efficiency and not fairness. We...

We analyze the Moral Hazard problem, assuming that agents are inequity averse. Our results differ from conventional contract theory and are more in line with empirical findings than standard results. We find: First, inequity aversion alters the structure of optimal contracts. Second, there is a...

We analyze the Moral Hazard problem, assuming that agents are inequity averse. Our results differ from conventional contract theory and are more in line with empirical findings than standard results. We find: First, inequity aversion alters the structure of optimal contracts. Second, there is a...

The European Union (EU) has moved towards bicameralism, making the codecision procedure its most important mechanism for decision making. To gauge if European Parliament (EP) and Council of Ministers (CM) are equally powerful "codecision makers", understanding of the final stage of the procedure...

If civil war is a contest for popular support, why would a government ever embark on a policy of disproportionate force and mass killing? The logic of civilian defection expects such an approach to easily backfire, as civilians respond to massive losses by opposing the side that inflicted them....

Cooperation is central to human societies. Yet relatively little is known about the cognitive underpinnings of cooperative decision-making. Does cooperation require deliberate self-restraint? Or is spontaneous prosociality reined in by calculating self-interest? Here we present a theory of why...

We review two fundamentally different ways that decision time is related to cooperation. First, studies have experimentally manipulated decision time to understand how cooperation is related to the use of intuition versus deliberation. Current evidence supports the claim that time pressure (and,...

Recent work using decontextualized economic games suggests that cooperation is a dynamic decision-making process: automatic responses typically support cooperation on average, while deliberation leads to increased selfishness. Here we performed two studies examining how these temporal effects...