We replicate Meissner (Exp Econ 19:281–298, 2016), where debt aversion was reported for the first time in an intertemporal consumption and saving problem. While Meissner (2016) uses a German sample, our participants are US undergraduate students. All of the original study’s main findings replicate with similar effect sizes. Additionally, we extend the original analysis by introducing a new individual index of debt aversion, which we use to compare debt aversion across countries. Interestingly, we find no significant differences in debt aversion between the original German and the new US sample. We then test whether debt aversion correlates with individual characteristics such as gender, cognitive reflection ability, and risk aversion. Overall, this paper confirms the importance of debt aversion in intertemporal consumption and saving problems and validates the approach of Meissner (2016).

We study the relative effectiveness of contracts that are framed either in terms of bonuses or penalties. In one set of treatments, subjects know at the time of effort provision whether they have achieved the bonus/avoided the penalty. In another set of treatments, subjects only learn the success of their performance at the end of the task. We fail to observe a contract framing effect in either condition: effort provision is statistically indistinguishable under bonus and penalty contracts.

We report experiments investigating how experience influences the endowment effect. Our experiments feature endowments which are bundles of unfamiliar consumption goods. We examine how a subject’s willingness to swap items from their endowment is influenced by prior experiences of tasting the goods in question and by prior experiences of choosing between them. We do not find a statistically significant endowment effect in our baseline treatment and, because of this, we are unable to test for an effect of consumption experience. We do find an endowment effect when the endowment is acquired in two instalments and, in this setting, we find some evidence that choice experience increases trading. In a follow-up experiment, we find evidence that the absence of an endowment effect in our baseline treatment is due to subjects being more willing to swap when they do not have to give up the last unit of their endowment.

We run an eye-tracking experiment to investigate whether players change their gaze patterns and choices after they experience alternative models of choice in one-shot games. In phase 1 and 3, participants play 2 × 2 matrix games with a human counterpart; in phase 2, they apply specific decision rules while playing with a computer with known behavior. We classify participants in types based on their gaze patterns in phase 1 and explore attentional shifts in phase 3, after players were exposed to the alternative decision rules. Results show that less sophisticated players, who focus mainly on their own payoffs, change their gaze patterns towards the evaluation of others’ incentives in phase 3. This attentional shift predicts an increase in equilibrium responses in relevant classes of games. Conversely, cooperative players do not change their visual analysis. Our results shed new light on theories of bounded rationality and on theories of social preferences.

We present evidence from a natural field experiment designed to shed light on whether individual behavior is consistent with a neoclassical model of utility maximization subject to budget constraints. We do this through the lens of a field experiment on charitable giving. We find that the behavior of at least 80% of individuals, on both the extensive and intensive margins, can be rationalized within a standard neoclassical choice model in which individuals have preferences, defined over own consumption and their contribution towards the charitable good, satisfying the axioms of revealed preference.

We explore gender differences in individuals’ motivations. We focus on guilt aversion and moral commitment. Our experiment supports the idea that men are more guilt-averse than women, while moral motivations drive more women's actions in a random dictator game with pre-play communication.

The Inclusion of Other in the Self (IOS) scale is a popular tool to measure interpersonal closeness that is increasingly being used in economics. We develop and validate a continuous version of the IOS scale. This Continuous IOS scale gives a finer measure and addresses the reluctance of subjects to report low scores on the standard IOS scale. We also propose a version of the standard IOS scale that meets its original design features. Our IOS scales are easy-to-use, well-documented, standardised, and available at https://github.com/geoffreycastillo/ios-js.

We introduce a novel way to elicit individuals’ strength of altruistic motivation in the context of charitable donations, ranging from pure warm glow to pure altruism. Using the giving-type elicitation task of Gangadharan et al. (2018) and assuming that individuals maximise a Cobb–Douglas impure altruism utility function, as is used in Ottoni-Wilhelm et al. (2017), we can uniquely identify the strength of altruistic motivation for impure altruists, which is typically found to be the largest category of donors. We compare the introduced measure to an alternative survey-based elicitation from Carpenter (2021).

I experimentally investigate the relation of endowment origin, cognitive abilities (as measured by the Cognitive Reflection Test, CRT), and co-operation in a one-shot linear public goods game. The results show that subjects’ contributions depend on an interplay of cognitive abilities and endowment origin. A house money effect exists only for subjects with low CRT scores. They contribute more when income was allocated to them and less when income was obtained by effort. In contrast, subjects with high CRT scores contribute the same amount independent of income type. The findings have implications for redistribution, team production, and experimental designs.

Is there a connection between pro-social behavior and well-being? This question has long been of interest, with Aristotle famously suggesting a nexus between virtues and well-being. To delve into this relationship, I conducted an extensive study encompassing multiple classical economic games and nearly 100 well-being questions. My findings confirm that different patterns of pro-sociality are robustly correlated with each other. On top, I find reliable correlations between well-being and pro-social behavior, as well as certain forms of punishment. In terms of underlying explanations, I observe that pro-sociality is particularly associated with a form of long-term well-being known as eudaimonia, suggesting that pro-social behavior plays a fundamental role in people perceiving their life as meaningful.

The widespread Internet “piracy” continues to fuel the debate about business models impervious to copyright infringement. We studied the displacement effects of “piracy” on sales in the book industry. We conducted a year-long large-scale field experiment: in the treatment group, we removed unauthorised copies appearing on the Internet and observed the sales data, whereas in the control group, we simply observed sales. We were able to substantially curb the unauthorised distribution, which resulted in a small, positive effect on sales. While using classical analysis we found it not to be significantly different from zero, a Bayesian approach using previous “piracy” studies to generate a prior led to the conclusion that protecting from piracy resulted in a significant sales boost of about 9 per cent.

Are economic decisions affected by short-term stress, failure, or both? Such effects have not been clearly distinguished in previous experimental research, and have the potential to worsen economic outcomes, especially in disadvantaged socioeconomic groups. We validate a novel experimental protocol to examine the individual and combined influences of stress, failure, and success. The protocol employs a 2 × 3 experimental design in two sessions and can be used online or in laboratory studies to analyse the impact of these factors on decision-making and behaviour. The stress protocol was perceived as significantly more stressful than a control task, and it induced a sizeable and significant rise in state anxiety. The provision of negative feedback (“failure”) significantly lowered participants’ assessment of their performance, induced feelings of failure, and raised state anxiety.

Empirical evidence has shown that people with better self-control to a greater extent have the self-regulatory ability to act in line with their long-term goals. In this pre-registered study, the relationship between self-control and self-regulatory behavior was investigated both directly and indirectly, i.e., through affective forecasting ability. This is of great interest as it is necessary to be able to forecast one's emotional response to future events in order to make choices that maximize one's happiness. However, in a laboratory experiment with undergraduate students, I found no evidence of self-control being associated with affective forecasting ability, or that people with better self-control more often acted in a way that maximized their expected happiness.

MTVE is an open-source software tool (citeware) that can be applied in laboratory and online experiments to implement video communication. The tool enables researchers to gather video data from these experiments in a way that these videos can be later used for automatic analysis through machine learning techniques. The browser-based tool comes with an easy user interface and can be easily integrated into z-Tree, oTree (and other experimental or survey tools). It provides the experimenters control over several communication parameters (e.g., number of participants, resolution), produces high-quality video data, and circumvents the Cocktail Party Problem (i.e., the problem of separating speakers solely based on audio input) by producing separate files. Using some of the recommended Voice-to-Text AI, the experimenters can transcribe individual files. MTVE can merge these individual transcriptions into one conversation.

This paper examines the impact of different ways of inducing discounting in alternating-offer bargaining games in the lab. We examine this by following the framework of Ochs and Roth (Am Econ Rev, pp. 355–384, 1989) and test whether the model's predictions find support in data under three different discounting implementations; the shrinking-pie procedure, the effective-discounting procedure and the bargaining-delay procedure. We find no sensitivity to the number of periods in any of the three procedures. However, we find mixed evidence for the effect of changing the discount factor in the effective-discounting procedure and the shrinking-pie procedure, but the magnitude of effects are small. Furthermore, there was more disagreement in both the effective-discounting and bargaining-delay procedures than in the shrinking-pie procedure.

We study the robustness of Krupka and Weber's method (2013) for eliciting social norms. In two online experiments with more than 1200 participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk, we find that participants’ response patterns are invariant to differences in the salience of the monetarily incentivized coordination aspect. We further demonstrate that asking participants for their personal first- and second-order beliefs without monetary incentives results in qualitatively identical responses in the case that beliefs and social norms are well aligned. Overall, Krupka and Weber's method produces remarkably robust response patterns.

Offline volunteering was faced with new challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a survey experiment with 1207 student participants, we test the impact of informing subjects about blood donation urgency (shortage information), and secondly, the effect of providing information about measures taken to reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission at blood donation centers (hygiene information), on their inclination to donate during and after the COVID-19 lockdown. The results show that shortage information increases extensive-margin willingness to donate for non-donors by 15 percentage points (pp), on average, and increases the willingness to donate quickly for all respondents. Hygiene information, however, reduces prior donors’ intention to donate again by 8pp, on average, and reduces the willingness of non-donors to donate quickly.

This paper investigates risk preferences using an artefactual field experiment conducted with a non-standard subject pool of farmers in Ghana. I introduce an alternative methodology for studying preferences following replication of a seminal risk elicitation procedure by Binswanger (Am J Agric Econ 62(3):395407, 1980). An important feature of both approaches is that they are easy to understand and, hence, are particularly suitable for eliciting preferences among subjects with low levels of formal education. I successfully replicate Binswanger's study, documenting how his original result of the moderate level of risk aversion for an average farmer can be generalized to a different country. However, using my alternative approach, whereby lotteries are presented in the loss domain, I find that half of my experimental subjects violated expected utility theory. This approach is of relevance to the current literature on studying risk preferences among subjects with poor literacy skills.

We contribute to a large literature that explores prosocial behavior in public goods experiments. We adopt an experimental design that allows full contribution to the public good to be sustained in equilibrium. We study the effect of the time horizon on a subject's propensity to contribute to a public good by varying the stopping rule for the game. While many studies examine the effect of a random stopping rule in prisoner's dilemma games, to our knowledge, only two other studies have directly compared behavior in public goods experiments with finite and random stopping rules. Consistent with existing studies, we find that contribution rates are similar across treatments in early rounds of play, and contribution rates are higher with random verses finite stopping rules in later rounds. Overall, we find significantly higher contributions to the public good when donors face a known probability of future interactions with the same group of participants compared to interactions with a finite endpoint. Further, the difference in cooperative behavior is driven primarily by the stopping rule, rather than the length of the game.

Some economic interactions are based on trust, others on monetary incentives or monitoring. In the tax compliance context, the monitoring approach creates compliance based on audits and fines (enforced compliance), in contrast to the trust-based (voluntary compliance) approach, which is based on taxpayers’ willingness to comply. Here, we examine how changes in taxation regarding platform economy revenues affect intended labor supply on such platforms. New EU legislation, effective from 2023, will mandate data sharing between platforms and tax authorities across Europe, thus resulting in increased monitoring. We investigate how this upcoming shift in monitoring power affects the intended use of platforms and how it may interact with users’ trust. We use a survey among platform workers (N = 626) in the Netherlands to examine views of the proposed regulation change, corrected for the proportion of platform income and several measures of trust. We experimentally manipulate information by either informing participants about the upcoming monitoring change or not. Results show that informing respondents about the change negatively affects expected supply of labor, and this effect is independent of respondents’ trust. We discuss the policy implications of these results.