According to several psychological and economic studies, non-binding communication can be an effective tool to increase trust and enhance cooperation. This paper focuses on reasons why people stick to a given promise and analyzes to what extent image concerns of being perceived as a promise...

Multiplicative growth processes that are subject to random shocks often have a skewed distribution of outcomes. In a number of incentivized laboratory experiments we show that a large majority of participants either strongly underestimate skewness or ignore it completely. Participants...

According to several psychological and economic studies, non-binding communication can be an effective tool to increase trust and enhance cooperation. This paper focuses on reasons why people stick to a given promise and analyzes to what extent image concerns of being perceived as a promise...

Credence goods markets suffer from inefficiencies caused by superior information of sellers about the surplus-maximizing quality. While standard theory predicts that equal mark-up prices solve the credence goods problem if customers can verify the quality received, experimental evidence...

In this paper, we shed light on the different moral costs of dishonesty and stealing. To accomplish this, we set up a die-rolling task which allowed participants to increase their own payout through dishonesty or theft. The results show that participants have fewer reservations about dishonesty...

Credence goods markets suffer from inefficiencies caused by superior information of sellers about the surplus-maximizing quality. While standard theory predicts that equal mark-up prices solve the credence goods problem if customers can verify the quality received, experimental evidence...

A growing literature has shown that behavioral biases influence consumer choices. Such so-called internalities are ubiquitous in many settings, including energy efficiency investments and the consumption of sin goods, such as cigarettes and sugar. In this paper, we use a mechanism design...

In this paper, we shed light on the different moral costs of dishonesty and stealing. To accomplish this, we set up a die-rolling task which allowed participants to increase their own payout through dishonesty or theft. The results show that participants have fewer reservations about dishonesty...

The paper applies economic theories to give an overview of the emerging phenomenon of digital personal assistants (DPAs). A DPA is an intelligent automated system that interacts with the user through a dialogue in natural language, and meanwhile applying third-party services to obtain...

Behavioral implementation studies implementation when agents' choices need not be rational. All existing papers of this literature, however, fail to handle a large class of choice behaviors because they rely on a well-known condition called Unanimity. This condition says, roughly speaking, that...