Meritocracies aspire to reward effort and hard work but promise not to judge individuals by the circumstances they were born into. The choice to work hard is, however, often shaped by circumstances. This study investigates whether people's merit judgments are sensitive to this endogeneity of...

People frequently behave non-selfishly in situations where they can reduce their own payoff to help others. It is typically assumed that such pro-social behavior arises because people are motivated by a social preference. An alternative explanation is that they follow a social norm. We test with...

Group decision-making processes are often adopted to strengthen social bonds. In this paper, I study experimentally the effects of group decision-making on social preferences towards group members, while distinguishing between participation and outcome effects. I find that participation in a...

We introduce the uncertainty of psychological motivation into a reciprocity model and explore its implications on behavior. We extend the Sequential Reciprocity Equilibrium in extensive-form games (Dufwenberg and Kirchsteiger, 2004) to a broader class of incomplete information games. We use this...

In this study, we propose a stochastic choice model to identify the motivations of prosocial behavior. We focus on the role of inequity aversion in outcome-based preferences and the shame of acting selfishly in social concerns. We employ an additively perturbed utility model to social...

One's willingness to accept an outcome or even to correct it depends on whether or not the underlying procedure is deemed legitimate. We manipulate the role allocation procedure in the dictator game to illustrate that this belief is not independent of the outcome and is self-serving in its...