The most famous element in Bentham's theory of punishment, the Panopticon Prison, expresses his view of the two purposes of punishment, deterrence and special prevention. We investigate Bentham's intuition in a public goods lab experiment by manipulating how much information on punishment...

Over the last 25 years, more than a hundred dictator game experiments have been published. This meta study summarizes the evidence. Exploiting the fact that most experiments had to fix parameters they did not intend to test, the meta study explores a rich set of control variables for...

In their majority, public international lawyers postulate that for a new rule of customary law to originate, two conditions must be fulfilled: there must be consistent practice, and it must be shown that this practice is motivated by the belief that such behaviour is required in law. Maurice...

The market for copyrights is characterised by a highly skewed distribution of profits: very few movies, books and songs generate huge profits, whereas the great bulk barely manages to recover production cost. At the moment when the owner of intellectual property grants a licence ('ex ante'),...

Do criminals maximise money? Are criminals more or less selfish than the average subject? Can prisons apply measures that reduce the degree of selfishness of their inmates? Using a tried and tested tool from experimental economics, we cast new light on these old criminological questions. In a...

Legitimacy may result from support for projects that a government implements. However, legitimacy may also result from the opportunity to participate in the selection process of projects. We tested the strength of these competing sources of legitimacy experimentally and their relationship. We...

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to profoundly transform and enrich experimental economic research. We propose a new software framework, "alter_ego", which makes it easy to design experiments between LLMs and to integrate LLMs into oTreebased experiments with human subjects. Our...

Successful solutions to pressing social ills tend to consist of innovative combinations of a limited set of alternative ways of perceiving and resolving the issues. These contending policy perspectives justify, represent and stem from four different ways of organizing social relations:...

Most of the time most individuals do not commit crime. Why? One explanation is deontological. People abide by legal rules just because these are the rules. In this perspective, the power of normativity is critical. It is supported by experimental evidence. To an impressive degree, participants...