Studying the likelihood that individuals cheat requires a valid statistical measure of dishonesty. We develop an easy empirical method to measure and compare lying behavior within and across studies to correct for sampling errors. This method estimates the full distribution of lying when agents privately observe the outcome of a random process (e.g., die roll) and can misreport what they observed. It provides a precise estimate of the mean and confidence interval (offering lower and upper bounds on the proportion of people lying) over the full distribution, allowing for a vast range of statistical inferences not generally available with the existing methods.

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.

Internet services are often free of charge but ask for customers’ personal data in exchange for usage. We experimentally study whether the provision of information-based public goods is susceptible to restraint when contributions not only make contributors better off but also enable a non-contributing “big player” to acquire substantial profits. We show that the presence of the big player crowds out the willingness to provide neutral tokens, but no such effect is observed for the provision of private information. Hence, collecting anonymized personal data instead of monetary fees can be more profitable to service providers and create greater benefits for customers.

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.

Many studies report on the association between 2D:4D, a putative marker for prenatal testosterone exposure, and economic preferences. However, most of these studies have limited sample sizes and test multiple hypotheses (without preregistration). In this study we mainly replicate the common specifications found in the literature for the association between the 2D:4D ratio and risk taking, the willingness to compete, and dictator game giving separately. In a sample of 330 women we find no robust associations between any of these economic preferences and 2D:4D. We find no evidence of a statistically significant relation for 16 of the 18 total regressions we run. The two regression specifications which are statistically significant have not previously been reported and the associations are not in the expected direction, and therefore they are unlikely to represent a real effect.

Garbarino et al. (J Econ Sci Assoc. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40881-018-0055-4, 2018) describe a new method to calculate the probability distribution of the proportion of lies told in “coin flip” style experiments. I show that their estimates and confidence intervals are flawed. I demonstrate two better ways to estimate the probability distribution of what we really care about—the proportion of liars—and I provide R software to do this.

The evidence on the welfare effects of kinship is mixed, suggesting both positive and adverse effects of kinship. This study looks into the differential effects of kinship on trusting and trustworthy behaviour by investigating the subjects’ motives and drivers of differential behaviour towards kin and non-kin. We conducted an economic experiment with households of rural India. We found that kin are trusted more than non-kin and that differential trust towards kin and non-kin is mainly driven by higher other-regarding preferences towards kin rather than being due to differences in expected reciprocity between kin and non-kin. We observed a heterogeneous effect of kin on trustworthy behaviour: kin exhibit low trustworthiness when they are not close to other kin, while they exhibit higher trustworthiness when they have close kin in the network.

This paper studies the impact of human subjects in the role of a seller on bidding in experimental second-price auctions. Overbidding is a robust finding in second-price auctions, and spite among bidders has been advanced as an explanation. If spite extends to the seller, then the absence of human sellers who receive the auction revenue may bias upwards the bidding behavior in existing experimental auctions. We derive the equilibrium bidding function in a model where bidders have preferences regarding both the payoffs of other bidders and the seller’s revenue. Overbidding is optimal when buyers are spiteful only towards other buyers. However, optimal bids are lower and potentially even truthful when spite extends to the seller. We experimentally test the model predictions by exogenously varying the presence of human subjects in the roles of the seller and competing bidders. We do not detect a systematic effect of the presence of a human seller on overbidding. We conclude that overbidding is not an artefact of the standard experimental implementation of second-price auctions in which human sellers are absent.

Our research addresses the effect of shared vs. mixed group identities in an information cascade game. We vary whether subjects always choose after a decision maker who shares the same identity or after a decision maker with a different identity. We find that subjects’ inclination to follow their predecessor is stronger in groups uniquely consisting of ingroup members compared to mixed groups. We relate this result to recent social cognition research.

According to the theory of guilt aversion, agents suffer a psychological cost whenever they fall short of other people’s expectations. In this paper, we suggest that there may be limits to this kind of motivation. We present evidence from an experimental dictator game showing that behavior is consistent with guilt aversion for relatively low levels of recipient expectations, roughly up to the point where the recipient expects half of the available surplus. Beyond that point the relationship between expectations and transfers becomes negative. Moreover, we examine this relationship at the individual level and establish a typology of subjects depending on how and whether they condition their behavior on recipient expectations.

The famous linguistic-savings hypothesis states that languages that grammatically separate the future from the present (like English) causally induce less future-oriented behavior than languages in which speakers can refer to the future using present tense (like German or Chinese). Chen et al., European Economic Review 120 (2019) experimentally investigate the effect of using future-oriented language on incentivized intertemporal choices and find no support for the hypothesis. We replicate Chen et al., European Economic Review 120 (2019)’s study in the German-speaking context. In our experiment with 332 subjects, we randomly refer to future payments using present or future tense and find no causal effect of language on intertemporal choice. Given the importance of replications for confidence in scientific findings, our results provide corroborating evidence that the linguistic-savings hypothesis is not empirically tenable. Eventually, the results provide a methodological contribution to the conduct of experiments.

The strategy method (SM) is, in practice, subject to a possibly severe economic-theoretical bias. Although many studies utilize SM to examine responses to rare or off-equilibrium behaviors unattainable through direct elicitation (DE), they ignore the fact that the strategic equivalence between SM and DE holds for the monetary payoff game but not the game participants actually play, which is in terms of utilities. We report three results. First, failing to account for estimation bias when decisions at one information set can influence utility at another may result in significant differences in decision-making. Second, the magnitude of this bias can be substantial, comparable to other measured treatment effects. Third, minor interventions targeting salience can amplify these differences similarly, causing treatment effects to differ significantly between SM and DE, even reversing in direction. These findings emphasize the need for reconsideration of the SM’s reliability for economic research.

If being asked to give to charity stimulates an emotional response, like empathy, that makes giving difficult to resist, a natural self-control mechanism might be to avoid being asked in the first place. We replicate a result from a field experiment that points to the role of empathy in giving. We conduct an experiment in a large superstore in which we solicit donations to charity and randomly allow shoppers the opportunity to avoid solicitation by using the other door. We find the rate of avoidance by store entrants to be 8.9 %. However, we also find that the avoidance effect disappears in very cold weather, suggesting that avoidance behavior is sensitive to its cost.

This article highlights a potential and significant economic–theoretical bias in the widely used strategy method (SM) technique. Although SM is commonly employed to analyze numerous observations per subject regarding rare or off-equilibrium behaviors unattainable through direct elicitation (DE), researchers often overlook a critical distinction. The strategic equivalence between SM and DE is applicable in the context of monetary payoff games, but not in the actual utility-based games played by participants. This oversight may lead to inaccurate conclusions and demand a reevaluation of existing research in the field. We formalize the mapping from the monetary payoff game to this actual game and delineate necessary and sufficient conditions for strategic equivalence to apply.

There is growing evidence that not all experimental subjects understand their strategic environment. We introduce a “choice process” (CP) protocol that aids in identifying these subjects. This protocol elicits in an incentive compatible manner provisional choices as players internalize their decision making environment. We implement the CP protocol in the modified 2/3 guessing game and use it to pinpoint players that are naive by identifying those who make weakly dominated choices some time into the play. At all time horizons these players average close to 50. This is consistent with the assumption in Level-K theory that the least sophisticated subjects (the naive ones) play uniformly over the [1–100] action space. In contrast, sophisticated players show evidence of increased understanding as time passes. We find that the CP protocol mirrors play in multiple setups with distinct time constraints. Hence it may be worth deploying more broadly to understand the interaction between decision time and choice.

Do people discriminate between men and women when they have the option to punish defectors or reward cooperators? Here, we report on four pre-registered experiments that shed some light on this question. Study 1 (N = 544) shows that people do not discriminate between genders when they have the option to punish (reward) defectors (cooperators) in a one-shot prisoner’s dilemma with third-party punishment/reward. Study 2 (N = 253) extends Study 1 to a different method of punishing/rewarding: participants are asked to rate the behaviour of a defector/cooperator on a scale of 1–5 stars. In this case too, we find that people do not discriminate between genders. Study 3a (N = 331) and Study 3b (N = 310) conceptually replicate Study 2 with a slightly different gender manipulation. These latter studies show that, in situations where they do not have specific beliefs about the gender of the defector/cooperator’s partner, neither men nor women discriminate between genders.

Dictator game experiments come in three flavors: plain vanilla with strictly dichotomous separation of dictator and recipient roles, an interactive alternative whereby every subject acts in both roles, and a variant thereof with role uncertainty. We add information regarding which of these three protocols was used to data from the leading meta-study by Engel (Exp Econ 14(4):583–610, 2011) and investigate how these variations matter. Our meta-regressions suggest that interactive protocols with role duality compared with standard protocols, in addition to being relevant as a control for other effects, render subjects’ giving less generous but more efficiency-oriented. Our results help organize existing findings in the field and indicate sources of confounds.

We examine how monetary incentives and information about others’ dishonesty affect lying decisions and whether these two dimensions interact with each other. Our experiment consists of a repeated cheating game where we vary the monetary incentives (Low, High, and Very High) and information about others’ dishonesty (With or Without information). We find that dishonesty decreases when payoffs are Very High. Information has only a weak positive effect on average. Conditioning on beliefs, we find that those who overestimate (underestimate) cheating reduce (increase) dishonesty. Information and payoffs do not interact with each other.

In this article, we highlight how simulation methods can be used to analyze power of economic experiments. We provide the powerBBK package programmed for experimental economists, that can be used to perform simulations in STATA. Power can be simulated using a single command line for various statistical tests (nonparametric and parametric), estimation methods (linear, binary, and censored regression models), treatment variables (binary, continuous, time-invariant or time varying), sample sizes, experimental periods, and other design features (within or between-subjects design). The package can be used to predict minimum sample sizes required to reach a user-specific level of power, to maximize power of a design given the researcher supplied a budget constraint, or to compute power to detect a user-specified treatment order effect in within-subjects designs. The package can also be used to compute the probability of sign errors—the probability of rejecting the null hypothesis in the wrong direction as well as the share of rejections pointing in the wrong direction. The powerBBK package is provided as an .ado file along with a help file, both of which can be downloaded here (http://www.bbktools.org).

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.