The idea that people follow trust norms when making trust decisions is developed in an evolutionary model of adaptive play by boundedly rational agents. Because it neither implies nor is it implied by cooperation, trust is not modelled as cooperation in a Prisoners' Dilemma but as a coordination...

I estimate the effects of collaborative and adversarial intergroup contact. I randomly assigned Indian men from different castes to participate in cricket leagues or to serve as a control group. League players faced variation in collaborative contact, through random assignment to...

We study the social interaction of non-smokers and smokers as a sequential game, incorporating insights from social psychology and experimental economics into an economic model. Social norms affect human behavior such that non-smokers do not ask smokers to stop smoking and stay with them, even...

Using a laboratory experiment, we present first evidence that stigmatization through public exposure causally reduces the take-up of an individually beneficial transfer. Our design exogenously varies the informativeness of the take-up decision by varying whether transfer eligibility is based on...

This study revisits the problem of the tragedy of the commons. Extracting agents participate in an evolutionary game in a complex social network and are subject to social pressure if they do not comply with the social norms. Social pressure depends on the dynamics of the resource, the network...

Why people participate in public good provision is one of the oldest questions in Economics. In the absence of enforcement mechanisms public goods would be under-provided. I develop a dynamic model of forward-looking agents in the presence of social pressure, which provides a potential...

Social norms have been used to nudge people toward specified outcomes in various domains. But can people be nudged to support, or to reject, proposed government policies? How do people's views change when they learn that the majority approves of a particular policy, or that the majority opposes...

This paper explores the determinants of survival in a life-and-death situation created by an external and unpredictable shock. We are interested in seeing whether pro-social behaviour matters in such extreme situations. We therefore focus on the sinking of the RMS Titanic as a quasi-natural...

Abstract While most scholars agree that prosocial motivations have replaced monetary incentives in open online communities, they often argue that these other-regarding motivations are based on exogenous preferences, and are the prerogative of the contributors. With the help of the French...

Social conformity pervades in societies by affecting a wide variety of attitudes and opinions. In this paper I study whether social conformity affects interpersonal trust attitudes. The empirical approach isolates a variable for common ethnic trust which is a characteristic of the ethnic social...