In prosocial decisions, decision-makers are inherently uncertain about how their decisions impact others' utility - we call this interpersonal uncertainty. We show that people's response to interpersonal uncertainty shapes well-known patterns of prosocial behavior. First, using standard social...

We study the developmental roots of cooperation in 929 young children, aged 3 to 6. In a unified experimental framework, we examine pre-registered hypotheses about which of three fundamental pillars of human cooperation - direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, and third-party punishment -...

We use novel data on nearly 6,000 children and adolescents aged 6 to 16 that combine incentivized measures of social, time, and risk preferences with rich information on child behavior and family environment to study whether children's economic preferences predict their behavior. Results from...

We study the developmental roots of cooperation in 929 young children, aged 3 to 6. In a unified experimental framework, we examine pre-registered hypotheses about which of three fundamental pillars of human cooperation - direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, and third-party punishment -...

How do mechanisms that enforce cooperation emerge in a society where none are available and agents are endowed with just raw power that allows a more powerful agent to expropriate a less powerful one? We study a model where expropriation is costly and agents can choose whether to engage in...

We investigate whether violations of canonical axioms of choice under risk are mistakes or a manifestation of true preferences. First, we elicit axiom and gamble preferences and then allow subjects to revise their potentially conflicting preferences. Among the behavioral patterns that allow for...

Ambiguous prospects are ubiquitous in social and economic life, but the psychological foundations of behavior under ambiguity are still not well understood. One of the most robust empirical regularities is the strong correlation between attitudes towards ambiguity and compound risk which...

We investigate financial experts’ beliefs about climate risk pricing and analyze how those beliefs influence stock return expectations. In a comprehensive survey, we elicit experts’ beliefs using both structured and open-ended questions. We establish that most experts share the view that...

In prosocial decisions, decision-makers are inherently uncertain about how their decisions impact others’ utility – we call this interpersonal uncertainty. We show that people’s response to interpersonal uncertainty shapes well-known patterns of prosocial behavior. First, using standard...

Although affirmative action remains controversial, little is known about who supports or opposes it and why. This paper investigates preferences for affirmative action by combining causal evidence from an experiment on the role of self-serving motives and in-group favoritism with survey data on...