Promises are prevalent in many economic environments. They offer the opportunity to honor future obligations when … promise keeping is observable. This paper studies the value of transparency and asks whether promises still work if such … transparency is missing. We focus on the context of campaign promises where institutional environments, for example, quality of the …

We introduce a novel incentive program aimed at decreasing school absenteeism based on the effect of voluntary promises … school absences. Our findings suggest that voluntary promises coupled with small gifts are effective in influencing behaviour …