Cooperation in one-shot anonymous interactions is a widely documented aspect of human behaviour. Here we shed light on the motivations behind this behaviour by experimentally exploring cooperation in a one-shot continuous-strategy Prisoner's Dilemma (i.e. one-shot two-player Public Goods Game)....

I define constrained efficient direct mechanisms as those that are not Pareto dominated within the set of direct mechanisms that satisfy some given feasibility constraints – incentive compatibility and other constraints. I show a standard equivalence with maximization of a social welfare...

To derive predictions from economic theory, the literature conventionally proceeds by studying, or ‘solving’, said theory through the lens of a solution concept (e.g. Nash equilibrium). In this paper, we argue that theoretical predictions are more suitably derived from an explicit set of...

The opportunity to tell a white lie (i.e., a lie that benefits another person) generates a moral conflict between two opposite moral dictates, one pushing towards telling always the truth and the other pushing towards helping others. Here we study how people resolve this moral conflict. What...

What is the extent and nature of religious prosociality? If religious prosociality exists, is it parochial and extended selectively to co-religionists, or is it generalized regardless of the recipient? Further, is it driven by preferences to help others or by expectations of reciprocity? We...

Recent work using decontextualized economic games suggests that cooperation is a dynamic decision-making process: automatic responses typically support cooperation on average, while deliberation leads to increased selfishness. Here we performed two studies examining how these temporal effects...

We model leadership selection, competition, and decision making in teams with heterogeneous membership composition. We show that if the choice of leadership in a team is imprecise or noisy—which may arguably be the case if appointment decisions are made by non-expert administrators—then it...

Despite their seemingly sophisticated economics, existing theories of the firm have made for poor public policy, as witnessed by recurrent crises in corporate governance. This Article identifies and begins to remedy this gap. It argues that to make sense of organizational behavior, the firm...