A natural way to obtain information about the concentration and dispersion of an expert's beliefs is to ask for a confidence interval. Our objective is to design an elicitation mechanism that rewards the expert on the basis of the realized event and satisfies a set of desirable properties. We...

Does the wish to convince others lead people to persuade themselves about the moral and factual superiority of their position? We investigate this question in the context of two international debating competitions, where persuasion goals (pro or contra a motion) are randomly assigned to debaters...

We investigate the role of advisers in the transmission of ethically relevant information, a critical aspect of executive decision making in organizations. In our laboratory experiment, advisers are informed about the negative externalities associated with the decision-maker's choices and...

This essay was written following discussions with friends and colleagues from different disciplines about the use of mathematics in the social sciences. It sets out some of the advantages of mathematical modeling (MM) in the social sciences, and defends it against some of the common criticisms...

Self-signaling theory argues that individuals partly behave prosocially to create or uphold a favorable self-image. To study self-signaling theory, we investigate whether increasing self-image concerns affects charitable giving. In our experiment subjects divide 20 euros between themselves and a...

Gender differences in voting patterns and political attitudes towards redistribution are well-documented. The experimental gender literature suggests several plausible behavioral explanations behind these differences, relating to gender differences in confidence concerning future relative income...

People typically update their beliefs about their own abilities too little in response to feed- back, a phenomenon known as “conservatism”, and some studies suggest that they overweight good relative to bad signals (“asymmetry”). We measure individual conservatism and asymmetry in three...

We analyze communication about the social returns to investment in a public good. We model two agents who have private information about these returns as well as their own taste for cooperation, or social preferences. Before deciding to contribute or not, each agent submits an unverifiable...

We conduct a laboratory experiment to study how demand for redistribution of income depends on self-interest, insurance motives, and social concerns relating to inequality and efficiency. Our choice environments feature large groups of subjects and real world framing, and differ with respect to...

Avoiding information about adverse welfare consequences of self-interested decisions, or "strategic ignorance", is an important source of corruption, anti-social behavior and even atrocities. I show how existing experimental results on strategic ignorance can be rationalized as an equilibrium...