We conduct a representative dictator game in which students and random members of the community choose both what charity to support and how much to donate to the charity. We find systematic differences between the choices of students and community members. Community members are much more likely to write in their own charity, community members donate significantly more ($17), on average, and community members are much more likely (32%) to donate the entire $100 endowment. Based on this evidence, it does not appear that student behavior is very representative in the context of the charitable donations and the dictator game.

Many experiments have demonstrated the power of norm enforcement— peer monitoring and punishment—to maintain, or even increase, contributions in social dilemma settings, but little is known about the underlying norms that monitors use to make punishment decisions, either within or across groups. Using a large sample of experimental data, we empirically recover the set of norms used most often by monitors and show first that the decision to punish should be modeled separately from the decision of how much to punish. Second, we show that absolute norms often fit the data better than the group average norm often assumed in related work. Third, we find that different norms seem to influence the decisions about punishing violators inside and outside one's own group.

We measure the other-regarding behavior in samples from three related populations in the upper Midwest of the United States: college students, non-student adults from the community surrounding the college, and adult trainee truckers in a residential training program. The use of typical experimental economics recruitment procedures made the first two groups substantially self-selected. Because the context reduced the opportunity cost of participating dramatically, 91 % of the adult trainees solicited participated, leaving little scope for self-selection in this sample. We find no differences in the elicited other-regarding preferences between the self-selected adults and the adult trainees, suggesting that selection is unlikely to bias inferences about the prevalence of other-regarding preferences among non-student adult subjects. Our data also reject the more specific hypothesis that approval-seeking subjects are the ones most likely to select into experiments. Finally, we observe a large difference between self-selected college students and self-selected adults: the students appear considerably less pro-social.

There is a large literature evaluating the dual process model of cognition, including the biases and heuristics it implies. However, our understanding of what causes effortful thinking remains incomplete. To advance this literature, we focus on what triggers decision-makers to switch from the intuitive process (System 1) to the more deliberative process (System 2). We examine how the framing of incentives (gains versus losses) influences decision processing. To evaluate this, we design experiments based on a task developed to distinguish between intuitive and deliberative thinking. Replicating previous research, we find that losses elicit more cognitive effort. Most importantly, we also find that losses differentially reduce the incidence of intuitive answers, consistent with triggering a shift between these modes of cognition. We find substantial heterogeneity in these effects, with young men being much more responsive to the loss framing. To complement these findings, we provide robustness tests of our results using aggregated data, the imposition of a constraint to hinder the activation of System 2, and an analysis of incorrect, but unintuitive, answers to inform hybrid models of choice.

We use an experiment to evaluate the effects of participatory management on firm performance. Participants are randomly assigned roles as managers or workers in firms that generate output via real effort. To identify the causal effect of participation on effort, workers are exogenously assigned to one of the two treatments: one in which the manager implements a compensation scheme unilaterally or another in which the manager cedes control over compensation to the workers who vote to implement a scheme. We find that output is between seven and twelve percentage points higher in participatory firms.

Measuring the social preferences of economic agents using experiments has become common place. This process, while incentive compatible, is costly and time consuming, making it infeasible in many settings. We combine standard altruism and warm glow choice experiments with a battery of candidate survey questions to construct behaviorally validated questionnaires. We use machine learning to create parsimonious 3-question modules that reliably replicate existing results on general altruism and provide an alternative method for collecting warm glow preferences.

Media coverage of Muslims has been repeatedly shown to be negative, and attitudes toward Muslims in American society are typically more negative than attitudes toward other social groups. Does the tone of media coverage directly affect public attitudes? This relationship is not well established with respect to Muslims, nor as a proposition about social groups in general. We use an online between-subjects experiment to examine whether exposure to articles of quantifiably different valences about Muslims or Catholics affects reported attitudes toward each of those groups. We find clear support for this proposition. Our additional tests demonstrate that this effect persists but is attenuated when money is at stake. We also identify anxiety as a key mediator between exposure to articles of different valences and attitudes about each group. Our findings suggest that articles of a particular tone can influence views of social groups.