Trust is an essential component of good social outcomes and effective economic performance. This is particularly true in environments such as the Prisoner's Dilemma or standard public-goods games, where the equilibrium in a one-shot case involves strictly uncooperative behavior. Evolutionary...

We study the following basic intuition: when faced with a decision how to split their investment between a risky lottery and an asset with a fixed return, people increase the proportion invested in the risky option the more they like the lottery. We find counter-examples to this, and in fact we...

Estimating the impact of risk aversion on emigration at the individual level is complicated by selection issues. In this paper, we use original data from Albania on mobility intentions and elicited risk aversion to provide causal estimates on this relationship. Our identification strategy relies...

Are men more willing to take financial risks than women? The answer to this important question is not clear from the existing literature. We propose a novel approach to this issue, in which we both assemble the data from many experiments with thousands of participants in a simple investment...

Departures from self-interest in economic experiments have recently inspired models of ?social preferences?. We design a range of simple experimental games that test these theories more directly than existing experiments. Our experiments show that subjects are more concerned with increasing...

This paper presents evidence that the willingness to punish an unfair action is sensitive to whether this action was preceded by a deceptive message. One player first sends a message indicating an intended play, which is either favorable or unfavorable to the other player in the game. After the...

In this paper, we report the results of experiments designed to test whether individuals and groups abide by the axioms of monotonicity, with respect to first-order stochastic dominance and Bayesian updating, when making decisions in the face of risk. The results indicate a significant number of...

We test an assortative mechanism whereby groups are formed endogenously, through the use of voting. Once formed, groups play a public-goods game, where the social value of an incremental contribution to the group account increases with the size of the group. Societies of nine people are...

The Winner's Curse (WC) is one of the most robust and persistent deviations from theoretical predictions that has been established in experimental economics and claimed to exist in many field environments. There have been many attempts to explain the winner's curse, such as ignoring the...

Can incentives be effective when trying to encourage the development of good habits? We investigate the effect of paying people a non-trivial amount of money to attend an exercise facility over a period of time. We find that doing so leads to an attendance level that is twice as high as the...