Our forthcoming book, Welfare Theory, Public Action and Ethical Values challenges the belief that, until modern welfare economics introduced issues such as justice, freedom and equality, economists adopted what Amartya Sen called “welfarism.” This is the belief that the welfare of society...

We test whether individuals internalize the effects that their behavior may have on the social image of their group. In our experiment, we recruit pairs of real-life friends and study whether rule breaking in the form of misreporting decreases when misreporting may have negative spillovers on...

The paper investigates whether the tertiarisation and the rapid urbanisation faced by developing countries favour agglomeration economies. Focusing on Ecuadorian cantons, a productivity equation is estimated using the GMM model with instruments controlling for endogeneity. The varying impact of...

With Big Data, decisions made by machine learning algorithms depend on training data generated by many individuals. In an experiment, we identify the effect of varying individual responsibility for moral choices of an artificially intelligent algorithm. Across treatments, we manipulated the...

Humans shape the behavior of artificially intelligent algorithms. One mechanism is the training these systems receive through the passive observation of human behavior and the data we constantly generate. In a laboratory experiment with a sequence of dictator games, we let participants’...

If individuals tend to behave like their peers, is it because of conformity, that is, the preference of people to align behavior with the behavior of their peers; homophily, that is, the tendency of people to bond with similar others; or both? We address this question in the context of an...

We study the reaction of investors to tail events across trading institutions. We conduct experiments in which investors bid on a financial asset that delivers a small positive reward in more than 99% of the cases and a large loss otherwise. The baseline treatment uses a repeated BDM mechanism...

We compare disagreement in expectations and the frequency of forecast revisions among five categories of agents: households, firms, professional forecasters, policymakers and participants to laboratory experiments. We provide evidence of disagreement among all categories of agents. There is...

Pro-social individuals face a trade-off between their monetary and moral motives. Hence, they may be tempted to exploit the uncertainty in their decision environment in order to reconcile this trade-off. In this paper, we investigate whether individuals with belief-dependent preferences avoid...

The search for a compromise between marginalism and egalitarianism has given rise to many discussions. In the context of cooperative games, this compromise can be understood as a trade-off between the Shapley value and the Equal division value. We investigate this compromise in the context of...