The central question this paper explores is “Do people keep their promise to avoid expectation-based guilt?” Using a novel design wherein we endogenously vary the promisor's expectation of what the promisee expects from him, we find that promisors are heterogeneous in their reasons for...

Individuals and two-person teams play a hidden-action trust game with pre-play communication. We replicate previous results for individuals that non-binding promises increase cooperation rates. But this does not extend to teams. While teams make non-binding promises to cooperate at the same rate...

Using an experiment, we demonstrate that a communication regime where a worker communicates about his intended effort is less effective in i) soliciting truthful information, and ii) motivating effort, than a regime where he communicates about his past effort. Our experiment uses a real-effort...

This paper experimentally investigates the hypothesis that promise-keeping behavior is affected by the opportunities that a counterpart foregoes by relying on the promise. We present two motivational mechanisms that could drive such an effect. One is that people dislike causing harm through a...