Donations and volunteerism can be conceived of as market transactions with a zero explicit price. However, evidence suggests people may not view zero as just another price when it comes to pro-social behavior. Thus, while markets might be expected to increase the supply of assets available to...

We explore the idea that prosocial behavior in experimental games is driven by social norms imported into the laboratory. Under this view, differences in behavior across subjects is driven by heterogeneity in sensitivity to social norms. We introduce an incentivized method of eliciting...

Commitment problems are inherent to non-binding conflict resolution mechanisms, since an unsatisfied party can ignore the resolution and initiate conflict. We provide experimental evidence suggesting that even in the absence of binding contractual agreements individuals often avoid conflict by...

We examine the roots of variation in corruption across societies, and we argue that marriage practices and family structure are an important, overlooked determinant of corruption. By shaping patterns of relatedness and interaction, marriage practices influence the relative returns to norms of...

Adam Smith identified two key components in the wealth creation process of human societies: exchange and specialization. More than two centuries later relatively little is understood about the underlying process by which people build exchange systems and discover comparative advantage. In this...

Due to the high costs of conflict both in theory and practice, we examine and experimentally test the conditions under which conflict between asymmetric agents can be resolved. We model conflict as a two-agent rent-seeking contest for an indivisible prize. Before conflict arises, both agents may...

Ethnic and kinship ties have long been viewed as potential catalysts for favoritism, and hence corruption. In experiments conducted in three countries, we recruit siblings, co-ethnics and strangers and vary the relationship(s) between the players of a game to observe how kin and ethnic ties...

Norm-based accounts of social behavior are increasingly common in economics. In such accounts, behavior is seen as reflecting tradeoffs between maximization of own consumption utility and conformity to social norms. Theories of norm-following tend to assume that a) there exists a single, stable,...

Why do people follow rules? We offer a short interdisciplinary survey on rule‐following, sketching various answers to the question offered by economists, psychologists, and philosophers. We start with a broad and colloquial notion of rules that spans from concrete, formal regulations to...

Bølstad and Dinas (2017) propose a model of spatial voting, based on social identity theory, that suggests supporting a candidate/policy on the other side of the ideological spectrum has a disutility that is not accounted for by common spatial-models. Unfortunately, the data they use are unable...