Substantial academic interest and public policy debate centers on campaign finance reform. Campaign resources can provide benefits to constituencies if candidates use them to fund the distribution of useful information. On the other hand, voters can potentially be harmed if candidates trade...

Grassroots fundraising leverages favor trading in social networks to support the provision of a public good. We use a laboratory experiment to study the elements and dynamics of this type of institution. Peer-to-peer reciprocity is important, and having the ability to practice targeted...

This paper experimentally investigates how donors respond to news about the efficiency of their charities, that is, to a real cost of giving greater than one, and how the response depends on that information being public or not. We find that as long as charities’ efficiency remains...

When do policies generate expressive or backlash effects? Recent economic models suggest that where a proscribed activity is prevalent, permissive laws liberalize attitudes toward partakers while increasing utility. The opposite occurs in communities where the proscribed activity is rare. To...

We conduct a laboratory experiment to explore whether the protection of intellectual property (IP) incentivizes people to create non-rivalrous knowledge goods, foregoing the production of other rivalrous goods. In the contrasting treatment with no IP protection, participants are free to resell...

We investigate the consistency and stability of individual risk preferences by slightly manipulating the cognitive resources of subjects through sleepiness. Participants are recruited and randomly assigned to an experiment session at a preferred time of day relative to their diurnal preference...

Negative campaigning is a recurring feature of political competition, though its persistence is puzzling in light of research showing that the public dislikes it. Why do candidates risk alienating voters by going negative? One answer may lie in the large empirical literature on persuasion...

Political campaigns spend millions of dollars each voting cycle on persuading voters, and it is well established that these campaigns do affect voting decisions. What is less understood is what element of campaigningÑthe content of the message or the delivery method itselfÑ sways voters, a...