When making political and economic decisions (e.g. voting, donating money to a cause), individuals consider the expectations of groups with which they identify. These expectations are injunctive norms, shared beliefs about appropriate behavior for identity group members, and individuals' choices...

Recent models of prosociality suggest that cooperation in laboratory games may be better understood as resulting from concern for social norms than from prosocial preferences over outcomes. Underlying this interpretation is the idea that people exhibit heterogeneous respect for shared norms. We...

The ability of markets to aggregate diverse information is a cornerstone of economics and finance, and empirical evidence for such aggregation has been demonstrated in previous laboratory experiments. Most notably Plott and Sunder (1988) find clear support for the rational expectations...

This paper investigates our capacity to attribute preferences to others. This ability is intrinsic to game theory, and is a central component of “Theory of Mind”, perhaps the capstone of social cognition. In particular, this component of theory of mind allows individuals to learn more...

We investigate in an economic experiment how people choose sides in disputes. In an eight-player side-taking game, two disputants at a time fight over an indivisible resource and other group members choose sides. The player with more supporters wins the resource, which is worth real money....

Auction winners sometimes suffer a "bidder's curse", paying more for an item at auction than the fixed price charged for an identical item by other sellers. This seemingly irrational behavior is puzzling because the information necessary to avoid overpaying would appear to be readily available...

When deciding whether to support a political candidate, policy or cause, individuals are observed to prioritize the expression of their political identities. They even knowingly incur personal costs (a lower wage, strained family relations) to do so. We argue that viewing political identities as...

This paper explores the possibility that informal property right systems evolve unique features as a function of the characteristics of the resources over which they are established. We develop a model to show how the emergent character of informal property rights in land varies with the...

We report an experimental test of alternative rules in innovation contests when success may not be feasible and contestants may learn from each other. Following Halac et al. (forthcoming), the contest designer can vary the prize allocation rule from Winner-Take-All in which the first successful...

A survey of instruction delivery and reinforcement methods in recent laboratory experiments reveals a wide and inconsistently-reported variety of practices and limited research evaluating their effectiveness. Thus we experimentally compare how methods of delivering and reinforcing experiment...