We conduct two experiments using a demographically diverse online subject pool to investigate total and extensive price elasticities of giving by age, income, gender, political ideology, and religiosity. A first exploratory experiment finds that religious subjects give more, are more likely to give, and are less sensitive to the price of giving than non-religious subjects. We find no statistically significant differences in price elasticities by age, income, gender, or political ideology. A second pre-registered experiment confirms these findings.

In a seminal paper, Frederick et al. (J Consum Res 36:553–561, 2009) showed that people’s willingness to purchase a consumer good declined dramatically when opportunity costs were made more salient (Cohen’s d = 0.45–0.85). This finding suggests that people normally do not pay sufficient attention to opportunity costs and as a result make poorer and less efficient decisions, both in private and public domains. To critically assess the strength of opportunity cost neglect, we carried out a systematic review and a meta-analysis including published and non-published experimental work. In total, 39 experimental studies were included in the meta-analysis (N = 14,005). The analysis shows a robust significant effect (Cohen’s d = 0.22; p < 0.001) of opportunity cost neglect across different domains, albeit the effect is considerably smaller than what was originally estimated by Frederick et al. (2009). Our findings highlight the importance of meta-analyses and replications of initial findings.

Evidence shows that the willingness of individuals to avenge punishment inflicted upon them for transgressions they committed constitutes a significant obstacle toward upholding social norms and cooperation. The drivers of this behavior, however, are not well understood. We hypothesize that ulterior motive attribution—the tendency to assign ulterior motives to punishers for their actions—increases the likelihood of counter-punishment. We exogenously manipulate the ability to attribute ulterior motives to punishers by having the punisher be either an unaffected third party or a second party who, as the victim of a transgression, may be driven to punish by a desire to take revenge. We show that survey respondents consider second-party punishment to be substantially more likely to be driven by ulterior motives than an identical, payoff-equalizing punishment meted out by a third party. In line with our hypothesis, we find that second-party punishment is 66.3% more likely to trigger counter-punishment than third-party punishment in a lab experiment. The loss in earnings due to counter-punishment is 64.6% higher for second-party punishers than third-party punishers, all else equal.

Regret aversion often compels individuals to undertake extensive searches before making a choice. Yet, donors hardly search among charitable alternatives prior to giving. It is unclear if donors search little because there is no regret to avoid as they rarely learn the outcome of their donations, or they simply do not care as donation outcomes do not directly impact them. To investigate if absence of regret is a contributing factor behind this lack of search, the current study develops an online experiment wherein subjects can research available charities before donating. While the control group does not receive any regret-inducing feedback (such as relative effectiveness of their donation) ex-post of decision-making, the treatment group is ex-ante aware of receiving charity rankings ex-post. While the control subjects donate without gathering information on charities, the treatment subjects research substantially more and consequentially donate to better ranked charities without decreasing donations.

Spectator games have emerged as a tool for measuring equality preferences. To measure equality preferences, the spectators are matched with a pair of stakeholders who have been allocated unequal endowments. The spectators decide how much to redistribute from one stakeholder’s endowment to the other one. We conducted a spectator experiment in which we fixed the spectators’ redistribution choice set and varied context of the “no distribution” choice. We found a strong effect of the context variation. The spectators who chose not to redistribute the stakeholders’ endowments increased from 12.3 to 38.0% in the treatment, making “no redistribution” more salient.

I find necessary and sufficient conditions for first-order stochastic dominance (FOSD) violations for choices from a budget line of Arrow securities. Applying this characterization to existing data, I compare FOSD violation rates across a broad set of risk preference elicitation tasks.

When affirmative action policies target more than one disadvantaged group, they contain uncertainty as to whether an individual who belongs to one of these groups was actually favored. In a laboratory experiment, we study how this feature affects outcomes of affirmative action in the form of quotas, and compare it with two other conditions, namely affirmative action with a certain favored group and no affirmative action. We find that when a group is favored with certainty and the social identity that triggers affirmative action is made salient, affirmed individuals are wrongly perceived as less competent, both by themselves and by others. Consequently, their willingness to compete does not increase and they are selected less for teamwork post competition. Affirmative action with uncertain favored groups does not distort belief in competence, and thus does not induce such unintended consequences. In contrast, it increases competition entry of the affirmed groups and enhances their chances of being selected for teamwork.

Recruitment of representative and generalizable adult samples is a major challenge for researchers conducting economic field experiments. Limited access to representative samples or the high cost of obtaining them often leads to the recruitment of non-representative convenience samples. This research compares the findings from two field experiments involving 860 adults: one from a non-representative in-person convenience sample and one from a representative online counterpart. We find no meaningful differences in the key behaviors of interest between the two samples. These findings contribute to a growing body of literature demonstrating that non-representative convenience samples can be sufficient in certain contexts.

People behave much more cooperatively than predicted by the self-interest hypothesis in social dilemmas such as public goods games. Some studies have suggested that many decision makers cooperate not because of genuine cooperative preferences but because they are confused about the incentive structure of the game—and therefore might not be aware of the dominant strategy. In this research, we experimentally manipulate whether decision makers receive explicit information about which strategies maximize individual income and group income or not. Our data reveal no statistically significant effects of the treatment variation, neither on elicited contribution preferences nor on unconditional contributions and beliefs in a repeated linear public goods game. We conclude that it is unlikely that confusion about optimal strategies explains the widely observed cooperation patterns in social dilemmas such as public goods games.

An intriguing study concluded that political conservatives exhibited enhanced self-control using the Stroop task [Clarkson et al.: The self-control consequences of political ideology. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A, 112(27): 8250–8253 (2015)]. We preregistered our plans to re-examine this finding using a larger, representative, incentivized, and ideologically balanced sample (n = 476). Across a variety of specifications, we report a consistent null effect of ideology on Stroop response latencies and the Stroop interference effect. These findings suggest that the previously reported result may not generalize. We conclude that there is no causal relationship between political ideology and self-control, as measured by the Stroop task.

This paper provides a close conceptual replication of the study by Di Tella et al. (Am Econ Rev 105: 3416–42, 2015) on self-serving beliefs. The design differs in some aspects from the original study, but maintains its fundamental structure and uses a larger sample size. The main findings of the original study are not replicated. If anything, beliefs seem to be biased in the opposite direction. These results are discussed jointly with two other replication efforts by Ging-Jehli et al. (Games Econ Behav 122–341, 2020) and Ahumada et al. (Well excuse me! replicating and connecting excuse-seeking behaviors, 2022). The main conclusion is that self-serving beliefs about others in strategic settings seem to be quite sensitive and hard to capture.

stratEst is a software package for strategy frequency estimation in the freely available statistical computing environment R (R Development Core Team in R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, 2022). The package aims at minimizing the start-up costs of running the modern strategy frequency estimation techniques used in experimental economics. Strategy frequency estimation (Stahl and Wilson in J Econ Behav Organ 25: 309–327, 1994; Stahl and Wilson in Games Econ Behav, 10: 218–254, 1995) models the choices of participants in an economic experiment as a finite-mixture of individual decision strategies. The parameters of the model describe the associated behavior of each strategy and its frequency in the data. stratEst provides a convenient and flexible framework for strategy frequency estimation, allowing the user to customize, store and reuse sets of candidate strategies. The package includes useful functions for data processing and simulation, strategy programming, model estimation, parameter testing, model checking, and model selection.