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How do people attribute responsibility when an outcome is not caused by an individual but results from a decision chain involving several people? We study this question in an experiment, in which five voters sequentially decide on how to distribute money between them and five recipients. The recipients can reward or punish each voter, which we use as measures of responsibility attribution. In the aggregate, we find that responsibility is attributed mostly according to the voters' choices and the pivotality of the decision, but not for being the initial voter. On the individual level, we find substantial heterogeneity with three overall patterns: Little to no responsibility attribution, pivotality-driven, and focus on choices. These patterns are similar when praising voters for good outcomes and blaming voters for bad outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present an experiment that sets up a context of production of a common output obtained by using production means that are randomly and unequally distributed. Before the production phase, subjects must choose a distributive principle for the output division, under ignorance of the allocation of the production means. Subsequently, they make a distributive choice fully aware of their luck and performance. The aim of the experiment is to test, first, whether ordinary subjects in an impartial situation are capable of converging on a fair principle of distribution – able of redressing the arbitrariness of the initial production means allocation; and second, whether these same ordinary subjects are capable of actually following that principle in a real distributive choice that excludes coercion, reputation effects and other forms of social pressures. The main finding is that a distributive rule that redresses initial inequalities is both accepted ex-ante and actually applied ex-post by most individuals. Our conclusion is relevant for the issue of realism of normative theories of justice and the possibility of institution design aimed at implementing distributive justice principles and policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates to what extent laboratory measures of cheating generalise to the field. To this purpose, we develop a lab measure that allows for individual-level observations of cheating whilst reducing the likelihood that participants feel observed. Decisions made in this laboratory task are then compared to individual choices taken in the field, where subjects can lie by misreporting their experimental earnings. We use two field variations that differ in the degree of anonymity of the field decision. According to our measure, no correlation of behaviour between the laboratory and the field is found. We then perform the same analysis using a lab measure that can only detect cheating at the aggregate level. In this case, we do find a weak correlation between the two environments. We discuss the significance and interpretation of these results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on an experimental test of the acceptability of the Principle of Accountability. This is a principle of social justice, and states, "individuals should be rewarded for factors under their control [...], but not for factors outside their control" (Cappelen and Tungodden (2009)). We specifically ask for acceptability of the principle underlying it, rather than for particular rewards in particular instances. We carry out the test with both an Internal and an External Dictator, conducting a laboratory experiment with a total of 240 subjects. We find that there is broad, but not overwhelming support for the Principle. When the Principle is internally inconsistent no clear preference emerges, which is not surprising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the notions of static and dynamic reasonableness of requests by an authority in a trust game experiment. The authority, modeled as the experimenter, systematically varies the experimental norm of what is expected from trustees to return to trustors, both in terms of the level of each request and in terms of the sequence of the requests. Static reasonableness matters in a self-biased way, in the sense that low requests justify returning less, but high requests tend to be ignored. Dynamic reasonableness also matters, in the sense that, if requests keep increasing, trustees return less compared to the same requests presented in random or decreasing order. Requests never systematically increase trustworthiness but may decrease it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dictator game (DG) is one of the simplest and most commonly used experimental games for examining economic and altruistic behaviors. Altruism became crucial in research on decisions in experimental and behavioral economy. This study extends existing research on the relationship between cognitive performance, measured by the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) and the DG, taking into account such factors as gender and declared religiosity. The research assesses whether gender and declared religiosity affect altruistic behavior measured in the DG's payoffs. 511 participants (master's students in economics) were asked to respond to six types of DGs and the CRT7 test. Correlation analysis, descriptive statistics, student t-tests, the Mann-Whitney test and Tobit regression analysis were conducted. Cognitive reflection was positively correlated with rational (selfish) behavior in the DG. Those dictators who scored high on the CRT (reflective dictators) kept more money for themselves than those who achieved lower scores on the CRT (altruistic, impulsive dictators). The results confirmed a distinct, inequity aversion attitude among altruistic, impulsive dictators and a selfish attitude among reflective dictators. The dictator's payoff was significantly related to the gender and declared religiosity of the participants. Women were more concerned about equal distribution of income than men (on average they shared 30% more than men) and religious agents shared 20%–30% more than non-believers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce several new variants of the dice experiment by Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi (Journal of the European Economic Association 11(3):525–547, 2013) to investigate measures to reduce lying. Hypotheses on the relative performance of these treatments are derived from a straightforward theoretical model. In line with previous research, we find that groups of two subjects lied at least to the same extent as individuals—even in a novel treatment where we assigned to one subject the role of being the other's monitor. However, we find that our participants hardly lied if they do not benefit and only others do, even if they were in a reciprocal relationship. Thus, we conclude that collaboration on lying mostly happens for personal gain. To mitigate selfish lying, an honesty oath which aims to increase moral awareness turned out to be effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the effects of voting rules on delay in a multilateral bargaining experiment with costly communication. Our design is based on a variant of the Baron–Ferejohn framework. Communication takes place after a proposer is selected and before a proposal is made. In contrast to prior experiments, communication is directly associated with costs in our setup. Specifically, every second of communication increases the probability that the game is terminated before a proposal can be made. In case of 'breakdown', each player receives an exogenously fixed disagreement value. Those values sum up to less than the amount of the available surplus, implying that delay owing to communication is costly. We vary the decision rule (majority versus unanimity) as well as the distribution of disagreement values (symmetric or asymmetric). We find that unanimity rule leads to longer communication delays and more frequent breakdowns in asymmetric, but not in symmetric situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many governments and charities adopt Rawlsian difference principle by maximizing the welfare of the least advantaged and giving priority to equality over efficiency. There are two views about which domain the principle should be applied to. The first applies it to the final distribution of income. Previous empirical studies have focused on this but found little evidence supporting it. The other view linked the principle with Rawlsian primary goods: Since the cost of losing primary social goods is huge, people will maximize the benefit of the least advantaged behind the veil of ignorance, such that everyone has access to necessary means. According to the latter reading of Rawls, we experimentally imposed a great cost for losing primary goods, and observed a salient majority of subjects obeying this principle, unlike previous studies finding a minority. Moreover, even if we lowered the cost for losing primary goods, more than one-third of the subjects still adopted this principle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monetary valuations for mortality and health risk reductions, elicited through stated preference surveys, have been shown to include values placed on others' welfare. Less attention has been paid to how these altruistic concerns, and hence willingness to pay (WTP), are affected when the public good is to be provided through taxation. We set up a theoretical framework to investigate this issue and show that when we move away from a first-best tax, WTP becomes distorted. However, once a 'Veil of Ignorance' is introduced into the model, this distortionary impact is reduced. We test this empirically using a laboratory experiment and confirm our theoretical findings, generating WTP values that are closer to the social optimum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a three-player dictator-game experiment, we find that similar performance during a shared experience with a real-effort task causes a redistributor to privilege the stakeholder who performed similarly. We generate the shared experience by varying whether a third-party decision maker and a stakeholder acquire money through an effortful activity or through random selection of a ticket. Our results have implications for how perceptions of one's own self-determination and social connectedness based on perceived similarities affect redistributive preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate in a laboratory experiment whether procedural fairness concerns affect how well individuals are able to solve a coordination problem in a two-player Volunteer’s Dilemma. Subjects receive external action recommendations, either to volunteer or to abstain from it, in order to facilitate coordination and improve efficiency. We manipulate the fairness of the recommendation procedure by varying the probabilities of receiving the disadvantageous recommendation to volunteer between players. We find evidence that while recommendations improve overall efficiency regardless of their implications for expected payoffs, there are behavioural asymmetries depending on the recommendation: advantageous recommendations are followed less frequently than disadvantageous ones and beliefs about others’ actions are more pessimistic in the treatment with recommendations inducing unequal expected payoffs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In reciprocal interactions, both genuine kindness and self-interested material gain may motivate socially beneficial actions. The paper presents results from two experiments that distinguish the role of perceived motives in reciprocal decision making from the role of outcomes or perceived intentions. The results indicate that positive reciprocity triggered by the same beneficial action is lower when the first-mover is more likely to be motivated by strategic incentives. Therefore, stronger incentives for beneficial behavior may not increase total welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies convex distributional preferences as a possible cause for the empirical observation that agents belonging to the same group tend to behave similarly in risky environments. We first show theoretically that convex distributional preferences imply social interaction effects in risky choices in the sense that observing a peer choose a risky (safe) option increases the agent’s incentive to choose the risky (safe) option as well, even when lotteries are stochastically independent and the agent can only observe the lottery chosen by the peer but not the corresponding outcome. We then confirm our theoretical predictions experimentally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many assignment processes in which agents are given the opportunity to unilaterally select a match. Resulting allocations can be inefficient if agents do not internalize the consequences of their choice on others. To test this formally, we study how other‐regarding behaviors vary across two decision contexts: when subjects make a pure allocation decision; and when they select a partner. In both settings each subject's decision is final and it affects their payoff and that of other subjects in the same way. We find that subjects are more likely to sacrifice their own material well‐being to increase that of others when dividing a pie than when selecting a partner in a large anonymous setting—even though the consequences on the material payoffs of others are identical. These findings suggest that in assignment processes with unilateral selection, efficiency can be improved by presenting the selection process as a choice between outcomes involving multiple individuals, instead of simply selecting a match for themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the role of intentions in two-player two-stage games. For this purpose we systematically vary the set of opportunity sets the first mover can choose from and study how the second mover reacts not only to opportunities of gains but also of losses created by the choice of the first mover. We find that the possibility of gains for the second mover (generosity) and the risk of losses for the first mover (vulnerability) are important drivers for second mover behavior. On the other hand, efficiency concerns and an aversion against violating trust seem to be far less important motivations. We also find that second movers compare the actual choice of the first mover and the alternative choices that would have been available to him to allocations that involve equal material payoffs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We elicit social preferences of 883 children and teenagers, aged eight to 17 years, in an experiment. Using an econometric mixture model we estimate a subject’s primary and secondary social preference motivations. The secondary motivation indicates the motivation that becomes relevant when the primary motivation implies indifference between various choices. For girls, particularly older ones, maximin-preferences are the most frequent primary motivation, while for boys efficiency concerns are most relevant. Examining secondary motivations reveals that girls are mostly social-welfare-oriented, with strong equity concerns. Boys are also oriented towards social welfare, but are more concerned with efficiency than with equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reaction time, usually measured in seconds, has been shown to be correlated with decisions in experimental games. In this paper, we study how allowing for a full day of “reflection time” alters behavior. We compare behavior in dictator and cheating games when participants make immediate choices with behavior when participants have an extra day to decide, and find that allowing for more time does not affect behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We experimentally investigate preference for randomization in social settings, in which the dictator chooses probabilistically between two allocations for herself and an anonymous recipient. We observe substantial proportions of subjects choosing to randomize under various circumstances. The observed patterns have rich implications for various assumptions in social preference models and shed light on recent studies on ex-ante and ex-post social preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizations aim to influence-via their internal guidelines and corporate culture-how unfair treatment of other stakeholders is perceived and condemned by employees. To understand how different frames and forms of publicity influence moralistic punishment, that is, the willingness of employees to take costs in order to foster norm compliance, we employ a modified version of a dictator game. In our dictator game, a bystander observes a dictator's behavior towards a recipient and can punish the dictator. We vary how the dictator's action is framed (either as giving money to the recipient or taking money from the recipient) and whether or not the recipient, as a victim of unfair behavior, is informed about the punishment. Our results suggest that bystanders are more likely to punish dictators when their action is framed as giving rather than taking, although both lead to the same consequences. When bystanders cannot inform recipients about their punishment, less punishment can be observed. On average, dictators partially anticipate this effect and behave more generously when recipients are informed about the bystanders' punishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By means of a laboratory experiment we investigate the role of risk preferences for prosocial behavior. Modifying the way the decision-maker or the recipient are exposed to risk, our design allows to identify how risk preferences impact giving-decisions. By measuring the decision-makers’ risk preferences regarding both their own as well as the recipients’ payoff, we generate new insights into how social preference theories may extend to risky situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The distributive justice norm of “just deserts”—i.e. the notion that one gets what one deserves—is an essential norm in a market society, and honesty is an important factor in economic and social exchange. We experimentally investigate the effect of violations of the distributive justice norm of “just deserts” on honesty in a setting where behaving dishonestly entails income redistribution. We find that the violation of the just deserts norm results in a greater propensity toward dishonesty. We then test a more general proposition that violations of just deserts induce dishonesty, even in cases where dishonesty does not have redistributive consequences. Our results confirm this proposition but only for cases in which the violation of just deserts also entails income inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report on a simple experiment that addresses three factors in the frequency of cooperation: (1) framing, (2) the number of players and (3) the perceived risk of cooperating. We work with a (two-player) Prisoner's Dilemma and with a three-player, two-strategy Public Good Game. We also consider a payoff schedule isomorphic with the latter but in a nonsocial setup. These themes have been separately studied by a large number of experimental papers, using diverse methodologies. Our experiment targets them in a common, clear-cut framework that minimizes confusion. We find three strong effects (a) framing; (b) the number of players (there is less cooperation in the three-person games than in the two-person ones); (c) the neutralization of risk (about 50% of participants cooperate when risk is neutralized). Both (a) and (c) go in the expected direction, but, in all three cases, the strength of the effect is surprising. Cooperators appear to be more motivated by efficiency or by Kantian reasoning than by altruism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We test male juvenile prisoners on a dictator game with another anonymous co-prisoner as recipient. Prisoners give more than students, but less than nonstudents of their age. They give more to a charity than to another prisoner. In one of two experiments, those convicted for violent crime give more than those convicted for property crime. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Do groups exhibit more or less inequality aversion than individuals? Although the previous literature has shown that in many environments individuals in groups make more selfish decisions than when deciding in isolation, we find that individuals express more inequality aversion when making initial proposals in a group decision-making environment compared to an individual decision-making environment. This may be driven by a change in the decision-making environment and by beliefs about the prevailing norm in the group, but we exclude that it is driven by a loss of anonymity or by efficiency concerns. By investigating how groups aggregate individual preferences under a unanimity rule, we show that the members with median social preferences lead the group decisions and a higher inequality aversion compared to the median slows down the convergence process. Overall, final decisions in groups reveal the same level of inequality aversion than individual decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many experiments find that trust intentions are a key determinant of prosociality. If intentions matter, then prosociality should depend on whether trust intentions can be credibly conveyed. This conjecture is formalized and tested in a noisy trust game where I vary the extent to which trust can be credibly signaled. I find that the introduction of noise threatens the onset of trust relations and induces players to form more pessimistic beliefs. Therefore policies that increase transparency of the decision-making environment may foster prosociality. However, the potential impact of such policies could be limited by a large heterogeneity in how individuals respond to changes in their information environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need to justify is both a widely observed social phenomenon and an important part of communication. This paper examines experimentally how pure pressure to justify affects conformity behavior in economic environments. The evidence suggests that pressure to justify increases sensitivity to norm deviations. In a one-shot anonymous interaction, compared with the case when the behavior is simply observed by the audience, individuals’ behaviors are more likely to reflect what they believe the audience thinks they should do when they must explain their decisions to the audience. Whether justification pressure can discourage selfish behavior is positively correlated with the proportion of individuals who believe the audience disapproves of such behavior. The implications of these findings can help shape institutions to promote conformity and prosocial behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study how cheating behavior is affected by incentives. After replicating the finding in the cheating game literature that lying does not increase with incentives, we show that this insensitivity is not a characteristic of the intrinsic lying cost, but rather a result of concern about being exposed as a liar. In a modified “mind” game in which this concern is eliminated, we find that people lie more, and in particular lie more when the incentives to do so increase. Thus, our results show that for many participants, the decision to lie follows a simple cost–benefit analysis: they compare the intrinsic cost of lying with the incentives to lie; once the incentives are higher than the cost, they switch from telling the truth to lying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a three-player queuing game to study procedural preferences in a laboratory experiment. Together with markets, queues and waiting lists are universal procedures for allocating goods and services. We designed our queuing game to disentangle motivations of outcome-oriented egoistic preferences, outcome-oriented distributional (inequality aversion) preferences and outcome-independent procedural preferences. In a series of treatments, we introduce a market element and allow two of the three players to bargain over a queue jump, thus violating the queuing procedure. A third player is able to engage in peer punishment to sanction queue jumping. We provide evidence that a simple model of procedural preferences is able to explain the behavior of a share of the subjects in our experiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]