We present a field study of social learning. The setting is a pair of adjacent fast food restaurants serving very similar cuisine whose main clientele are the students at a nearby major university. We observed whether an uninformed customer's choice of restaurant depends on the relative queue...

The authors use a labor supply; relative pay; experimental economics laboratory experiment to examine the impact of relative wages on labor supply. They test the hypothesis that, ceteris paribus, making a given wage high (low) relative to other wage levels will lead to an increase (decrease) in...

This study investigates how information on solicitors' compensation affects charitable giving in a door-to-door field experiment with more than 2,800 households. We vary whether solicitors are paid or not and the information about this compensation that potential donors receive. Relative to the...

We report the results of a randomized controlled trial testing whether incentivizing physical exercise improves the academic performance of college students. As expected, the intervention increases physical activity. The main result is that it generates a strong and significant improvement in...

This paper presents an experimental investigation of optimal learning in repeated coordination games. We find evidence for such learning when we limit both the cognitive demands on players and the information available to them. We also find that uniqueness of the optimal strategy is no guarantee...

Social norms permeate society across a wide range of issues and are important to understanding how societies function. In this paper we concentrate on 'bad' social norms - those that are inefficient or even damaging to a group. This paper explains how bad social norms evolve and persist; our...

It is estimated that a trillion dollars are annually exchanged in bribes, distorting justice and economic efficiency. In a novel experiment, we investigate the drivers of bribery. Two participants compete for a prize; a referee picks the winner. Participants can bribe the referee. When the...

Expert advice is often biased in ways that benefit the advisor. We demonstrate how self-deception helps advisors be biased while preserving their self-image as ethical and identify limits to advisors' ability to self-deceive. In experiments where advisors recommend one of two investments to a...

Despite decades of research on heuristics and biases, empirical evidence on the effect of large incentives – as present in relevant economic decisions – on cognitive biases is scant. This paper tests the effect of incentives on four widely documented biases: base rate neglect, anchoring,...

This chapter provides a framework for how incentives affect behavior change. Economic theory is built on the premise that incentives matter, but empirical evidence shows the effect of incentives on behavior is more complicated than predicted by the basic law of demand. Our framework highlights...