Experimental literature on pro-social behavior has been largely focused on settings where the decision of donors is sufficient for an interaction to occur. However, in many real-life applications recipients first have to ask donors for help to initiate the transaction. We suggest that this first...

Although different approaches and methods have been used to measure inequality aversion, there remains no consensus about its drivers at the individual level. We conducted an experiment on a sample of more than 1800 first-year undergraduate economics and business students in Uruguay to...

Engelmann and Strobel (AER 2004) question the relevance of inequity aversion in simple dictator game experiments claiming that a combination of a preference for efficiency and a Rawlsian motive for helping the least well-off is more important than inequity aversion. We show that these results...

This paper studies the evolution of both characteristics of reciprocity - the willingness to reward friendly behavior and the willingness to punish hostile behavior. Firstly, preferences for rewarding as well as preferences for punishing can survive evolution provided individuals interact within...

In settings where other-regarding motives are likely to be (and some would argue, should be) at the forefront of our minds, how much of our behavior can still be explained by narrow pecuniary self-interest by itself? In an experiment where subjects are asked to vote between two income...

Compliance with a social norm is a matter of self-enforceability and endogenous motivation to conform which is relevant not just to social norms but also to a wide array of institutions. Here we consider endogenous mechanisms that become effective once the game description has been enriched with...

We show that people manipulate their attitudes towards ambiguity when doing so allows them to behave more self-interestedly. In a "dictator" decision subject chose between a "fair" and an "unfair" choice. By choosing the latter, dictators increase their own allocation by decreasing the...

We study a decision maker (DM) who has preferences over sets of payoff-allocations between herself and a passive recipient, which represent second-stage choice problems. The recipient is only aware of second-stage choice of an allocation. Not choosing the normatively best allocation in the...

We study the heterogeneity of preferences regarding the limited substitutability of environmental public goods vis-a-vis private consumption goods and how it affects the economic valuation of environmental public goods. We show theoretically that mean marginal willingness to pay for an...