Social interactions frequently take place under the shadow of the future. Previous literature explains cooperation in indefinitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma as driven predominantly by self-interested strategic considerations. This paper provides a causal test of the importance of social preferences in such contexts. In a series of pre-registered experiments, we show that high levels of cooperation can be sustained when prosocial individuals interact in segregated groups. By comparing their behavior with that of mixed and selfish groups, we highlight the conditions under which other-regarding motivations matter in repeated interactions.

People, across a wide range of personal and professional domains, need to accurately detect whether the state of the world has changed. Previous research has documented a systematic pattern of over- and under-reaction to signals of change due to system neglect, the tendency to overweight the signals and underweight the system producing the signals. We investigate whether experience, and hence the potential to learn, improves people’s ability to detect change. Participants in our study made probabilistic judgments across 20 trials, each consisting of 10 periods, all in a single system that crossed three levels of diagnosticity (a measure of the informativeness of the signal) with four levels of transition probability (a measure of the stability of the environment). We found that the system-neglect pattern was only modestly attenuated by experience. Although average performance did not increase with experience overall, the degree of learning varied substantially across the 12 systems we investigated, with participants showing significant improvement in some high diagnosticity conditions and none in others. We examine this variation in learning through the lens of a simple linear adjustment heuristic, which we term the “δ-ϵ” model. We show that some systems produce consistent feedback in the sense that the best δ and ϵ responses for one trial also do well on other trials. We show that learning is related to the consistency of feedback, as well as a participant’s “scope for learning” how close their initial judgments are to optimal behavior.

We performed a field experiment in Uruguay in which a 20-year-old chooses between a socially visible and a non-socially visible good after a friend randomly received one of these goods or an unknown one. We find no differences in choices when the friend received the nonvisible good instead of the unknown one. However, decision-makers significantly changed their allocation when their friend received the visible good. Consistent with status concerns driving the results, those in a disadvantaged position consumed more and those in an advantaged position consumed less of the visible good. These findings constitute the first experimental evidence of Duesenberry’s demonstration effects and show that status consumption is a relevant phenomenon among the youth in a developing country setting.

Over the last four decades, a broad stream of experimental literature has been published using the Common Pool Resource (CPR) game to study how people react to congestible resources, and how to keep such resources from socially harmful overexploitation. With the goal of providing guidance to future work on this still-important paradigm, we provide a narrative review of the literature, summarizing the results for several key aspects of the experimental operationalization. We classify these aspects into two broad categories. The first describes ‘environmental’ assumptions on the modeled resource problem itself. This refers to aspects of the experimental environment reflecting factors such as group size, resource size and asymmetry of access, which generally constitute the nature of the dilemma. The second category involves ‘institutional’ issues related to how people might solve the problem, such as user communication between subjects, information about previous subjects’ choices, and regulatory measures.

We report two meta-analyses on the determinants of antisocial behavior in experimental settings in which such behavior is not rationally motivated by pecuniary incentives. The first meta-analysis employs aggregate data from 95 published and unpublished studies (24,086 participants), using laboratory, field and online experiments carried out since 2000. We find that antisocial behavior depends significantly on the experimental setting, being highest in vendetta games and lowest in social dilemmas. As we find significant heterogeneity across the studies, including across game classes, in the second meta-analysis, we focus only on “Joy of Destruction” (JoD) and money-burning (MB) experiments, for which we have the most observations, 51 studies and around 16,784 participants. Overall, our findings suggest that procedural fairness and being observed by others reduce the frequency of antisocial behavior. Online and field experiments display more antisocial behavior than laboratory experiments. We also find that the strategy method biases antisocial behavior upward. However, we do not find evidence for a positive publication bias being correlated with higher destructive behavior, either in the general meta-analysis or in relation to JoD/MB experiments; if anything, there is evidence of a negative publication bias. The JoD/MB meta-analysis finds evidence of a price effect for destruction frequency, negative discrimination against outsiders, within-subject designs underestimating destructive behavior, and more antisocial behavior in one-shot interactions. Collectively, our results point to the value of more laboratory experiments that systematically build on paradigmatic experimental designs to enable comparability and the identification of key economic drivers of antisocial behavior.

Narrow bracketers who are myopic in specific decisions would fail to consider preexisting risks in investment and neglect hedging opportunities. Growing evidence has demonstrated the relevance of narrow bracketing. We take a step further in empirical investigation and study individual heterogeneity in narrow bracketing. Specifically, we use a lab experiment in investment and hedging that elicits subjects’ preferences on rich occasions to uncover the individual degree of narrow bracketing without imposing distributional assumptions. Combining prospect theory and narrow bracketing can explain our findings: Subjects who invest more also insure more, and subjects insure significantly less in the loss domain than in the gain domain. More importantly, we show that the distribution of the individual degree of narrow bracketing is skewed at two extremes, yet with a substantial share of people in the middle who partially suffer from narrow bracketing. Neglecting this aspect, we would overestimate the severity of narrow bracketing and misinterpret its relation with individual characteristics.

In two sets of novel laboratory experiments, we show that the mere presence of an existing alliance at the onset of coalition formation may lead managers to form economically suboptimal alliances. Study Set 1 considers alliance formation when a focal firm is already embedded in an existing coalition. These studies show evidence of a status quo bias: participants managing the focal firm tend to include the current partner in alliance offers and thus are less successful in forming optimal alliances compared to those in an unattached control condition. Study Set 2 examines the extent to which an unattached focal firm attempts to ‘poach’ away attractive coalition partners from their embedded alliances. Our results show evidence of poaching avoidance: participants make fewer offers to, and are less likely to partner with, an attractive firm already in an alliance. However, this tendency to avoid poaching may be attenuated when the existing coalition is perceived as a powerful threat and/or alternate partners are unavailable. These findings provide behavioral insights into how judgmental biases can constrain alliance formation. We conclude with a discussion of how selected environmental, firm, and decision-maker characteristics (e.g., turbulence, embedded relationships, and risk orientation) may moderate these results.

In a field experiment where revelation of co-worker earnings and the shape of the earnings distribution are exogenously controlled, I test whether relative earnings information itself influences effective labor supply and labor supply elasticity. Piece-rate workers shown their peer earnings standing provide significantly more labor effort. However, the productivity boost from earnings disclosure disappears when inequalities in the underlying piece rate exist. By cross-randomizing net of tax piece rates, labor supply elasticity with respect to the net of tax wage is also estimated. Unlike labor level, I find this labor elasticity is unchanged by the relative standing information. Taken together, these findings have direct implications for how to best model relative status concerns in utility functions, supporting some and precluding other common ways. More speculatively, they also suggest social comparisons could be strategically used to grow firm output or the tax base, and, that underlying inequalities in compensation schemes inhibit the ability of social comparisons to incentivize work.

How do bribes and lobbying distort judgment? In our experiment, referees are tasked with judging a worker’s performance, and awarding a bonus to workers who score above a certain threshold. We find that bribes and lobbying are both distortionary, but in different ways. Whereas lobbying increases the number of workers receiving a bonus, bribes weaken the relationship between performance and success, with bonuses mostly being awarded to workers who bribe. We discuss implications for anti-corruption interventions.

Research on individual decisions from experience reveals a robust tendency to behave as if rare events are underweighted. Experimental studies of strategic interactions often exclude probabilistic outcomes, thus neglecting the potential extension of this tendency to strategic games. Our study addresses this gap by examining how players in games adjust their strategies when confronted with low-probability, high-impact outcomes. We introduce two finitely repeated, asymmetric games with lottery-based payoffs. These games, when simplified by replacing lotteries with their expected values, yield straightforward equilibrium predictions based on dominant strategies. However, results from three experiments reveal players strongly deviate from these predictions, instead behaving consistently with underweighting of rare events. The results additionally indicate that social preferences also play a role in shaping behavior. To explain these observations, we propose the simplistic Reciprocal Altruistic Sampler (REALS) model. This model posits that players’ decisions are a result of the interplay between reliance on small samples of past experiences, altruistic tendencies, and strategic considerations. We experimentally compare behavior in variants of the games that disentangle the behavior to these three components, and show that the REALS model, despite its simplicity, effectively captures their complex interactions. Our results additionally demonstrate that players can often choose strictly dominated strategies in a sophisticated effort to react to underweighting of rare events by other players. Overall, this study enhances our understanding of strategic decision making by highlighting the crucial impact of rare events and the interplay of different uncertainties in influencing players’ choices.

Wrong-doers may try to collaborate to achieve greater gains than would be possible alone. Yet potential collaborators face two issues: they need to accurately identify other cheaters and trust that their collaborators do not betray them when the opportunity arises. These concerns may be in tension, since the people who are genuine cheaters could also be the likeliest to be untrustworthy. We formalise this interaction in the ‘villain’s dilemma’ and use it in a laboratory experiment to study three questions: what kind of information helps people to overcome the villain’s dilemma? Does the villain’s dilemma promote or hamper cheating relative to individual settings? Who participates in the villain’s dilemma and who is a trustworthy collaborative cheater? We find that information has important consequences for behaviour in the villain’s dilemma. Public information about actions is important for supporting collaborative dishonesty, while more limited sources of information lead to back-stabbing and poor collaboration. We also find that the level of information, role of the decision maker, and round of the experiment affect whether dishonesty is higher or lower in the villain’s dilemma than in our individual honesty settings. Finally, individual factors are generally unrelated to collaborating but individual dishonesty predicts untrustworthiness as a collaborator.

Information about the consequences of our consumption choices can be unwelcome, and people sometimes avoid it. Thus, when people possess information that is inconvenient for another person, they may face a dilemma about whether to inform them. We introduce a simple and portable experimental game to analyze the transmission of inconvenient information. In this game, a Sender can, at a small cost, inform a Receiver about a negative externality associated with a tempting and profitable action for the Receiver. The results from our online experiment (N = 1,512) show that Senders transmit more information when negative externalities are larger and that Senders’ decisions are largely driven by their own preferences towards the charity and their own use of information. We do not find evidence that Senders take the Receiver’s preferences into account, as they largely ignore explicit requests for information, or ignorance, even if Receivers have the option to punish the Sender.

Explicit and implicit incentives and opportunities for mutually beneficial voluntary cooperation coexist in many economic relationships. In a series of eight laboratory gift-exchange experiments, we show that incentives can lead to crowding out of voluntary cooperation even after they have been abolished. This crowding-out also occurs in repeated relationships, which otherwise strongly increase effort compared to one-shot interactions. Using a unified econometric framework, we unpack these results as a function of positive and negative reciprocity, as well as the principals’ wage offer and the incentive compatibility of the contract. Crowding-out occurs mostly due to reduced wages and not a change in reciprocal wage–effort relationships. Our systematic analysis also replicates established results on gift exchange, incentives, and crowding out of voluntary cooperation while being exposed to incentives. Overall, our findings show that the behavioral consequences of explicit incentives strongly depend on the features of the situation in which they are embedded.

Using a laboratory experiment, we investigate complexity in decision problems as a cause of failures in contingent reasoning. For this purpose, we introduce three dimensions of complexity to a decision problem: the number of contingencies, the dominance property of choices, and reducible states. Each decision problem is designed to reflect variations in complexity across the three dimensions. Experimental results show that the number of contingencies has the most significant effect on failures in contingent reasoning. The second dimension, the dominance property of choices, also has a statistically significant effect, though the effect size is smaller than in the existing literature. In contrast, the third complexity dimension has no impact; presenting the decision problem in a reduced or reducible form does not change subjects’ performance on contingent reasoning. Additionally, we examine the Power of Certainty and show its existence. This effect is particularly pronounced when the number of contingencies is large.

A growing number of studies use “real” effort designs for laboratory experiments where subjects complete an actual task to exert effort rather than using a stylized effort design where subjects simply choose an effort level from a predefined set. The commonly argued reason for real effort is that it makes the results more generalizable and field relevant. We investigate the nature of modeling effort provision by first trying to provide a clear theoretical understanding of the nature of effort costs. We then empirically examine claims about the differences between real effort and stylized effort. A key to our examination is ensuring that we compare the two modes of effort provision keeping effort costs constant, which is a point overlooked in many past examinations. In our data, when controlling for effort costs, we find no differences in behavior between real and stylized effort. Given the importance of effort costs and the lack of a generally accepted way to include them in real effort designs, we provide a simple add-on that any researcher can use with their real effort experiments to incorporate a theoretically appropriate and controlled cost of effort even in a real effort setting. We also discuss ways to better approach modeling effort costs in experiments, whether one is conducting real or stylized designs, to improve inference on research questions.

We investigate the role of visual attention in risky choice in a rich experimental dataset that includes eye-tracking data. We first show that attention is not reducible to individual and contextual variables, which explain only 20% of attentional variation. We then decompose attentional variation into individual average attention and trial-wise deviations of attention to capture different cognitive processes. Individual average attention varies by individual, and can proxy for individual preferences or goals (as in models of “rational inattention” or goal-directed attention). Trial-wise deviations of attention vary within subjects and depend on contextual factors (as in models of “salience” or stimulus-driven attention). We find that both types of attention predict behavior: average individual attention patterns are correlated with individual levels of loss aversion and capture part of this individual heterogeneity. Adding trial-wise deviations of attention further improves model fit. Our results show that a decomposition of attention into individual average attention and trial-wise deviations of attention can capture separable cognitive components of decision making and provides a useful tool for economists and researchers from related fields interested in decision-making and attention.

Disappointment aversion has been suggested as an explanation for non-truthful rankings in strategy-proof school-choice matching mechanisms. We test this hypothesis using a novel experimental design that eliminates important alternative causes of non-truthful rankings. The design uses a simple contingent choice task with only two possible outcomes. Between two treatments, we manipulate the possibility for disappointment aversion to have an effect on ranking. We find a small and statistically marginally significant treatment effect in the direction predicted by disappointment aversion. We therefore conclude that disappointment aversion is a minor contributor to non-truthful rankings in strategy-proof school-choice matching mechanisms.

Using an appropriation game setting, we examine individual responses to changes in a groups’ vulnerability to a probabilistic loss (L) of a public good. The probabilistic loss parameter entails losing 10, 50 or 90% of the value of the public good that is maintained through cooperation, where the likelihood of the loss decreases in total group cooperation. By design, the expected marginal net benefits to an individual and the expected harm to others depends endogenously on the individuals’ expectations of group cooperation and exogenously on the magnitude of the loss parameter. We find that individual cooperation is greater when forecasts of total group cooperation are greater and where the magnitude of the probabilistic loss is larger. There is, however, an interesting asymmetry in responses by two subgroups. Subjects who are pessimistic regarding total group cooperation decrease cooperation the higher the magnitude of the probabilistic loss and their decisions are tied systematically to changes in their expectations of other’s cooperation. On the other hand, subjects who are optimistic regarding total group cooperation are found to be more cooperative, but their decisions are not systematically tied to changes in expectations of others’ cooperation.

We run a laboratory experiment to test the concept of coarse correlated equilibrium (Moulin and Vial in Int J Game Theory 7:201–221, 1978), with a two-person game with unique pure Nash equilibrium which is also the solution of iterative elimination of strictly dominated strategies. The subjects are asked to commit to a device that randomly picks one of three symmetric outcomes (including the Nash point) with higher ex-ante expected payoff than the Nash equilibrium payoff. We find that the subjects do not accept this lottery (which is a coarse correlated equilibrium); instead, they choose to play the game and coordinate on the Nash equilibrium. However, given an individual choice between a lottery with equal probabilities of the same outcomes and the sure payoff as in the Nash point, the lottery is chosen by the subjects. This result is robust against a few variations. We explain our result as selecting risk-dominance over payoff dominance in equilibrium.