Societies prohibit many transactions considered morally repugnant, although potentially efficiency-enhancing. We conducted an online choice experiment to characterize preferences for the morality and efficiency of payments to kidney donors. Preferences were heterogeneous, ranging from...

We use a range of dictator game experiments to investigate why people avoid information. Dictators in our experiment know their own payoffs and can choose whether to learn the payoffs of the recipient. We vary whether dictators can learn the recipient's payoff before or after they are presented...

The most successful human societies are those that have found better ways to promote cooperative behaviour. Yet, cooperation is individually costly and, therefore, it often breaks down, leading to enormous social costs. In this article, I review the literature on the mechanisms and interventions...

Choosing what is morally right can be based on the consequences (ends) resulting from the decision - the Consequentialist view - or on the conformity of the means involved with some overarching notion of duty - the Deontological view. Using a series of experiments, we investigate the overall...

Economists have been theorizing that other-regarding preferences influence decision making. Yet, what are the corresponding psychological mechanisms that inform these preferences in laboratory games? Empathy and Theory of Mind (ToM) are dispositions considered to be essential in social...

We design an experiment to test whether the behavior of dictators can be rationalized by the impurely altruistic utility function. By giving the recipients an endowment of varying levels, we create an environment that allows for observable differences in behavior depending upon whether pure or...

We show that, if giving is equivalent to not taking, impure altruism could account for List's (2007) finding that the payoff to recipients in a dictator game decreases when the dictator has the option to take. We examine behavior in dictator games with different taking options but equivalent...

Standard social choice experiments generally force subjects to make decisions about giving money to another person, but the ability to avoid information outside of the lab could lead to less altruistic or fair behavior than such experiments tend to suggest. I expand on the design of Dana, Weber,...

When and how should a fundraiser ask for a donation from an individual facing an uncertain bonus income? A standard model of expected utility over outcomes predicts that the individual’s before choice – her ex-ante commitment conditional on her income – will be the same as her choice after...

Motivation represents a foundation corestone on which analyses in a number of the humanities and social sciences are built. For a long time, economists have seen motivation as connected with the act of giving, trying to interpret it in the context of the neoclassical economics assumptions. On...