We analyze a large-stakes prisoner's dilemma game played on a TV show. Players cooperate 40% of the time, demonstrating that social preferences are important; however, cooperation is significantly below the 50% threshold that is required for inequity aversion to sustain cooperation. Women...

This paper studies the use of discretionary rewards in a finitely repeated principal-agent relationship with moral hazard. We show that the principal, when she obtains a private subjective signal about the agent’s performance, may pay discretionary bonuses to provide credible feedback to the...

The aim of this paper is to explain gift giving as due to a demand for social approval and status. In a simple framework we are able to account for a number of stylized facts. These are that gift giving is often reciprocal, that gifts tend to be inadequate, and that gift giving is sometimes...

This paper analyzes behavior on a TV game show where players' monetary payoffs depend upon an array of factors, including ability in answering questions, perceived cooperativeness and the willingness of other players to choose them. We find a substantial beauty premium and are able to...

Aspiration levels are a relevant aspect of decision making. We develop a model that includes the overall probabilities of success and failure relative to the aspiration level into an expected utility representation. This turns out to be equivalent to expected utility with a discontinuous utility...

Psychologists and economists have argued that rewards often have hidden costs. One possible reason is that the principal may have incentives to offer higher rewards when she knows the task is difficult. Our experiment tests if high rewards embody such bad news and if this is correctly perceived...

We examine factors that may contribute to 'overconfidence' in relative ability on an intelligence test. We test experimentally for evidence of self-esteem concerns and instrumental strategic concerns. Errors in Bayesian updating are rare when the information does not involve own relative...