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...

We study the relation between ambiguity aversion and the Allais paradox. To this end, we introduce a novel denition of hedging which applies to objective lotteries as well as to uncertain acts, and we use it to dene a novel axiom that captures a preference for hedging which generalizes the one...

Research on economic growth suggests that the era of colonization has had an impact on the levels of economic development of countries around the globe. However, why some countries were colonized early, some late, and others not at all, and what effect these differences have had on current...

Consider a marriage market with continuous-time two-sided search and trans- ferable utility in which the match payo depends on age. This paper characterizes a set of payo functions consistent with two salient marriage age patterns: (1) assortative match- ing by age, and (2) \dierential age...

Using three waves of survey data from fishing villages in Aceh, Indonesia for 2005-2009, we examine the determinants of local volunteer labor after the tsunami. Pre-existing social capital and the form of aid delivery (but not trauma) strongly affect village volunteerism initially, but these...

In this paper, we introduce a new measure of how close a set of choices are to satisfying the observable implications of rational choice, and apply it to a large balanced panel of household level consumption data. We use this method to answer three related questions: (i) "How close are...

This paper experimentally tests the predictions of a principal-agent model in which the agent has biased beliefs about his ability. Overcondent workers are found to earn lower wages than undercondent ones because they overestimate their expected payo, and principals adjust their oers...

Since 2003, Zambia has been engaged in a large-scale, centrally coordinated national anti- Malaria campaign which has become a model in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper aims at quantifying the individual and macro level benefits of this campaign, which involved mass distribution of insecticide...

We consider the regret matching process with finite memory. For general games in normal form, it is shown that any recurrent class of the dynamics must be such that the action profiles that appear in it constitute a closed set under the “same or better reply” correspondence (CUSOBR set) that...

We devise a new experimental game by nesting a voluntary contributions mechanism in a broader spectrum of incentive schemes. With it, we study tensions between egalitarianism, equity concerns, self-interest, and the need for incentives. In a 2x2 design, subjects either vote on or exogenously...