Broken Windows: the metaphor has changed New York and Los Angeles. Yet it is far from undisputed whether the broken windows policy was causal for reducing crime. In a series of lab experiments we show that first impressions are indeed causal for cooperativeness in three different institutional...

This article reports on a field study that has been conducted in the online computer game World of Warcraft. In a basic labor situation a principal gives an upfront wage to an agent (who is unaware that he is participating in an experiment) and asks him to conduct a real-effort task. The unique...

In this paper, we first model the dynamics of an economy, making use of a simple, almost trivial circular flow analysis. Then, we demonstrate the effects of keeping up with the Jonesesʺ as well as of keeping ahead of the Smithsʺ in private consumption and the role of innovation and imitation...

We study how different payment modes influence the effectiveness of gift exchange as a contract enforcement device. In particular, we analyze how horizontal fairness concerns affect performance and efficiency in an environment characterized by contractual incompleteness. In our experiment, one...

We conduct a field experiment on direct and indirect transfer mechanisms. It shows that people are willing to donate significantly more if the donation is indirect, i.e., it is tied to the purchase of a good with a price premium, rather than made directly. This points to an...

We consider the problem of fairly allocating one indivisible object when monetary transfers are possible, and examine the existence of Bayesian incentive compatible mechanisms to solve the problem. We propose a mechanism that satisfies envy-freeness, budget balancedness, and Bayesian incentive...

This paper studies the problem of fairly allocating an amount of a divisible resource when preferences are single-peaked. We characterize the class of envy-free and peak-only rules and show that the class forms a complete lattice with respect to a dominance relation. We also pin down the...

This paper considers the object allocation problem introduced by Shapley and Scarf (1974). We study secure implementation (Saijo, Sjöström, and Yamato, 2007), that is, double implementation in dominant strategy and Nash equilibria. We prove that (i) an individually rational solution is...

The literature on social preferences provides overwhelming evidence of departures from pure self-interest of individuals. Experiments show that people care about others' well-being and their relative standing. This paper investigates whether this type of behavior persists when risk comes into...

Although income inequality has been studied extensively, relatively little attention has been paid to the role of household production. Economic theory predicts that households with less money income will produce more goods at home. Thus extended income, which includes the value of household...