This study reveals the existence of a causal link between the availability of money and an expanded scale of interaction. We constructed an experiment where participants chose the group size, either a low-value partnership or a high-value group of strangers, and then faced an intertemporal...

We designed a natural-field experiment in the context of local public transportation to test whether rewards in the form of lottery prizes coupled with traditional sanctions efficiently reduce free-riding. We organized a lottery in a medium-size Italian city the participation in which is linked...

This paper assesses the effect of two stylized and antithetic non-monetary incentive schemes on students' effort. We collect data from a field experiment where incentives are exogenously imposed, performance is monitored and individual characteristics are observed. Students are randomly assigned...

We study how distributional preferences are affected by a major property rights reform that transformed informal use-rights over land traditionally characterizing rural Beninese villages in a system akin to private ownership. The design combines the randomized control-trial implementation of the...

The impact of workers' non-pecuniary motivation on their productivity is a fundamental issue in labor economics. Previous studies indicate that prosocially motivated workers may perform better when assigned to jobs having socially desirable implications – even if effort is non contractible and...

In an experiment on the repeated prisoner's dilemma where intended actions are implemented with noise, Fudenberg et al. (2012) observe that non-equilibrium strategies of the "tit-for-tat" family are largely adopted. Furthermore, they do not find support for risk dominance of TFT as a determinant...

We study time preferences by means of a longitudinal lab experiment involving both monetary and non-monetary rewards (leisure). Our novel design allows to measure whether participants prefer to anticipate or delay gratification, without imposing any structural assumption on the instantaneous...

Impersonal exchange is the hallmark of an advanced society. One key institution for impersonal exchange is money, which economic theory considers just a primitive arrangement for monitoring past conduct in society. If so, then a public record of past actions - or memory - supersedes the function...

We present results from a laboratory experiment identifying the main channels through which different law enforcement strategies deter organized economic crime. The absolute level of a fine has a strong deterrence effect, even when the exogenous probability of apprehension is zero. This effect...