We experimentally study settings where an individual may have an incentive to adopt negative beliefs about another's intentions in order to justify egoistic behavior. Our first study uses a game in which a player can take money from an opponent in order to prevent the opponent from subsequently...

Narratives pervade almost any aspect of our life and play a particularly important role in moral and prosocial decision-making. We study how positive (stories in favor of a prosocial action) and negative (stories in favor of a selfish action) narratives influence prosocial behavior. Our main...

Attention is a pivotal resource in the modern economy and plays an increasingly prominent role in economic analysis. We summarize research on attention from both psychology and economics, placing a particular emphasis on its capacity to explain numerous documented violations of classical...

Both psychologists and economists have argued that rewards often have hidden costs. One possible reason is that the principal may have incentives to offer higher rewards when she knows the task to be dificult. Our experiment tests if high rewards embody such bad news and if this is perceived by...

We investigate whether the presence of a default interacts with the willingness of decision-makers to gather, process and consider information. In an online experiment, where about 2,300 participants choose between two compiled charity donation options worth $100, we vary the availability of...

Identifying the cause of discrimination is crucial to design effective policies and to understand discrimination dynamics. Building on traditional models, this paper introduces a new explanation for discrimination: discrimination based on motivated reasoning. By systematically acquiring and...

A long-standing puzzle is how overconfidence can persist in settings characterized by repeated feedback. This paper studies managers who participate repeatedly in a high-powered tournament incentive system, learning relative performance each time. Using reduced form and structural methods we...