For decades, experimental economics has been very interested in behavior that could be characterized as practicing solidarity (although the term is rarely used). Solidarity is a key concept in Catholic Social Teaching. This paper builds a bridge between these two endeavors that, thus far, had...

For decades, experimental economics has been very interested in behavior that could be characterized as practicing solidarity (although the term is rarely used). Solidarity is a key concept in Catholic Social Teaching. This paper builds a bridge between these two endeavors that, thus far, had...

Some current utility models presume that people are concerned with their relative standing in a reference group. If this is true, do certain types care more about this than others? Using simple binary decisions and self-reported happiness, we investigate both the prevalence of ``difference...

Departures from pure self interest in economic experiments have recently inspired models of "social preferences". We conduct experiments on simple two-person and three-person games with binary choices that test these theories more directly than the array of games conventionally considered. Our...

We consider abstract social systems of private property, made of n individuals endowed with non-paternalistic interdependent preferences, who interact through exchanges on competitive markets and Pareto-efficient lumpsum transfers. The transfers follow from a distributive liberal social contract...

We conduct a real-effort task experiment where subjects' performance translates into a donation to a charity. In a within-subjects design we vary the visibility of the donation (no/private/public feedback). Confirming previous studies, we find that subjects' performance increases, that is, they...

While most papers on team decision-making find that teams behave more selfishly, less trustingly and less altruistically than individuals, Cason and Mui (1997) report that teams are more altruistic than individuals in a dictator game. Using a within-subjects design we re-examine group...

The paper investigates price formation in a decentralized market with random matching. Agents are assumed to have subdued social preferences: buyers, for example, prefer a lower price to a higher one but experience reduced utility increases below a reference price which serves as a common...

The paper investigates price formation in a decentralized market with random matching. Agents are assumed to have subdued social preferences: buyers, for example, prefer a lower price to a higher one but experience reduced utility increases below a reference price which serves as a common...

We examine social preferences of Swedish and Austrian children and adolescents using the experimental design of Charness and Rabin (2002). We find that difference aversion decreases while social-welfare preferences increase with age.