What motivates agents to choose pro-social but dominated actions in principal-agent interactions like the trust game? We investigate this by exploring the role higher-order beliefs about payoffs play in an incentivized laboratory experiment. We find that when there are asymmetries in such higher...

Promising serves as an important commitment mechanism by operating on a potential cheater’s internal value system. We present experimental evidence on what motivates people to keep their promises. First, they feel that they are duty-bound to keep their promises regardless of whether promisees...

In this paper, we hypothesize that the strength of the consensus effect, i.e., the tendency for people to overweight the prevalence of their own values and preferences when forming beliefs about others' values and preferences, depends on the salience of own preferences. We manipulate salience by...