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...

Do firms have adequate incentives to invest in anti-terrorism mechanisms? This paper develops a framework for addressing this issue when the security choices by one agent affect the risks faced by others. We utilize the airline security problem to illustrate how the incentive by one airline to...

The conventional wisdom is that a big jurisdiction sets a higher tax rate than a small jurisdiction. We show this result arises due to simplifying assumptions that imply tax-base sensitivities are equal across jurisdictions. When more than two jurisdictions compete in commodity taxes, tax-base...

In recent years a large number of experimental studies have documented the existence of strong reciprocity among humans. Strong reciprocity means that people willingly repay gifts and punish the violation of cooperation and fairness norms even in anonymous one-shot encounters with genetically...

This paper experimentally investigates the impact of different pay and relative performance information policies on employee effort. We explore three information policies: No feedback about relative performance, feedback given halfway through the production period, and continuously updated...

The title of this chapter is deliberately provocative. Intuitively, many will be inclined to see conscious control of mental process as a good thing. Yet control comes at a high price. The consciously not directly controlled, automatic, parallel processing of information is not only much faster,...

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 report results from three well-known experimental paradigms, where we use time, rather than money, as the salient component of subjects’ incentives. The three experiments, commonly employed to study social preferences, are the dictator game, the ultimatum game and the trust game. All...

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,...

We conduct an artefactual field experiment to examine various spillover effects of Affirmative Action policies in the context of castes in India. We test a) if individuals who enter tournaments in the presence of an Affirmative Action policy remain competitive after the policy has been removed,...