Single-sex classes within coeducational environments are likely to modify students' risk-taking attitudes in economically important ways. To test this, we designed a controlled experiment using first year college students who made choices over real-stakes lotteries at two distinct dates....

We find clear demographic and ability effects on bidding in common value auctions: inexperienced women are much more susceptible to the winner's curse than men, controlling for SAT/ACT scores and college major; economics and business majors substantially overbid relative to other majors; and...

Social interdependence is believed to play an important role in how people make individual choices. This paper presents a simple model constructed on the premise that people are motivated by their own payoff as well as by how their actions compare with those of other people in their reference...

The expectation that non-cooperators will be punished can help to sustain cooperation, but there are competing claims about whether opportunities to engage in higher-order punishment (punishing punishment or failure to punish) help or undermine cooperation in social dilemmas. In a set of...

During the last two decades, laboratory experiments have come into increasingprominence and constitute a popular method of research to examine behavioral outcomes and social preferences. However, it has been debated whether results from these experiments can be extrapolated to the real world and...

This experimental study asks whether generosity decreases emotional distance, a question pertinent to human service quality. Highly vulnerable service recipients may not enforce quality standards. Quality can then be viewed as an act of generosity, a gift from the provider to the recipient. For...

Assuming individuals rationally decide whether to participate or not to participate in lab experiments, we hypothesize several non-representative biases in the characteristics of lab participants. We test the hypotheses by first collecting survey and experimental data on a typical recruitment...

This paper models the Self-Sufficiency Project (SSP), a controlled randomized experiment concerning welfare. The model of household behavior includes stochastic labor market skill, job opportunities, and value of non-labor market time. All the variation within and between treatment groups,...

People contribute more to public goods, the more others give ('crowding-in'). We investigate two possible causes of crowding-in: reciprocity, the usual explanation, and conformism, a neglected alternative. The issue is important since conformism has more scope to bring about endogenous social...

This paper examines whether, in India, discriminatory practices by government-employed child caregivers along religious lines, lead to differential health outcomes among the care receiving children. Child caregivers participate in a novel allocation game where we incorporate treatments to...