The decision when to provide services by the public sector and when to use the private sector is a fundamental one. The economic literature emphasises that the efficiency of the mechanisms of delivery will depend on the contractual nature of what can be achieved by the parties and the political...

People often form expectations about others using the lens of their own attitudes (the so-called consensus effect). We study the implications of this for trust and trustworthiness. Trustworthy individuals are more \optimistic" than opportunists and are accordingly less afraid to engage in...

We study Nature's trade-off when endowing people with the cognitive ability to distinguish between different time periods or different prizes. Our key premise is that cognitive ability is a scarce resource, to be deployed only where and when it really matters. We show that this simple insight...

This article discusses proposed governance reforms of legal services markets. The model distinguishes between a status quo position supported by a system of professionally enforced collective reputation and forms of governance based more squarely on market mechanisms. We identify a number of...

We present two experiments designed to investigate whether individuals' notions of distributive justice are associated with their relative (within-society) economic status. Each participant played a specially designed four-person dictator game under one of two treatments, under one initial...

We adopt a mixed methods approach to investigate whether and how heterogeneity in individual returns to a public good affects contributions. We engage smallholder farmers in Sri Lanka in: a one-shot, framed, lab-in-the-field experiment, within which the farmers' rates of return to the public...

We use a novel experiment to investigate whether people aim to coordinate when, to do so, they have to lie; and are more willing to lie when, in doing so, they are aiming to coordinate with a potential accomplice, i.e., another with whom coordination would be beneficial and who is facing the same...

Using a political-frame-free, lab-in-the-field experiment, we investigate the effects of employment status and political ideology on preferences for redistribution. The experiment consists of a real-effort task, followed by a four-player dictator game. In one treatment, initial endowments depend...

Using a specially designed experiment, we investigate whether and how interdependence in risk exposure i.e., risk taking by some members of a potential risk sharing group affecting not only their own but also their co-members risk exposure, affects both risk taking and ex post sharing. The...

We experimentally investigate the relationship between discriminatory behaviour and the perceived social inappropriateness of discrimination. We test the framework of Akerlof and Kranton (2000, 2005), which suggests discrimination will be stronger when social norms favour it. Our results support...