We systematically investigate prisoner’s dilemma and dictator games with valence framing. We find that give versus take frames influence subjects’ behavior and beliefs in the prisoner’s dilemma games but not in the dictator games. We conclude that valence framing has a stronger impact on behavior in strategic interactions, i.e., in the prisoner’s dilemma game, than in allocation tasks without strategic interaction, i.e., in the dictator game.

We join a growing body of literature suggesting that the languages people speak influence their decision-making. We tested whether dropping the first-person pronoun “I” affects pro-social behavior in a dictator game-like setting. To this end, we conducted an online randomized, incentivized experiment with a socially representative sample of 2000 Japanese respondents. We provide compelling causal evidence that pronoun dropping reduces pro-sociality. Given that our results provide little empirical support for previous research findings linking first-person pronoun use and lower pro-sociality, we prescribe caution in using languages as a proxy for culture in several cross-country empirical studies in economics.

The hypothesis that intuition promotes cooperation has attracted considerable attention. Although key results in this literature have failed to replicate in pre-registered studies, recent meta-analyses report an overall effect of intuition on cooperation. We address the question with a meta-analysis of 82 cooperation experiments, spanning four different types of intuition manipulations—time pressure, cognitive load, depletion, and induction—including 29,315 participants in total. We obtain a positive overall effect of intuition on cooperation, though substantially weaker than that reported in prior meta-analyses, and between studies the effect exhibits a high degree of systematic variation. We find that this overall effect depends exclusively on the inclusion of six experiments featuring emotion-induction manipulations, which prompt participants to rely on emotion over reason when making allocation decisions. Upon excluding from the total data set experiments featuring this class of manipulations, between-study variation in the meta-analysis is reduced substantially—and we observed no statistically discernable effect of intuition on cooperation. Overall, we fail to obtain compelling evidence for the intuitive cooperation hypothesis.

This article studies whether people want to control what information on their own past pro-social behavior is revealed to others. Participants are assigned a color that depends on their past pro-social behavior. They can spend money to manipulate the probability with which their color is revealed to another participant. The data show that participants are more likely to reveal colors with more favorable informational content. This pattern is not found in a control treatment in which colors are randomly assigned, thus revealing nothing about past pro-social behavior. Regression analysis confirms these findings, also when controlling for past pro-social behavior. These results complement the existing empirical evidence, confirming that people strategically and, therefore, consciously manipulate their social image.

Households are frequently subject to income and asset shocks. We performed a lab experiment, inducing losses on a real effort task, after which we measured cognitive performance, loss aversion and cheating behavior. We found that asset losses, but not income losses, act as a cognitive load, by decreasing accuracy and increasing response times. We did not detect any change in dishonesty or loss aversion.

Most large real-world organizations contain multiple smaller groups, such as working groups within firms. However, can this sort of nested groups be used to alleviate coordination failures in the larger group? We report on a multi-player Stag Hunt experiment wherein we hierarchically structure a large group into mutually exclusive small groups. We offer varying incentive payments if efficient coordination is achieved at a large or small group level. The novelty of our design is that we hold the total payment size constant between treatments. In our nested incentive treatment, we reduce the reward for achieving large-group coordination by a small amount and reallocate the same amount to successful small-group coordination. The results reveal that incentive reallocations privileging small groups facilitate efficient large-group coordination in the nested group structure.

We test whether anchoring affects people’s elicited valuations for a bottle of wine in individual decision-making and in markets. We anchor subjects by asking them if they are willing to sell a bottle of wine for a transparently uninformative random price. We elicit subjects’ Willingness-To-Accept for the bottle before and after the market. Subjects participate in a double auction market either in a small or a large trading group. The variance in subjects’ Willingness-To-Accept shrinks within trading groups. Our evidence supports the idea that markets have the potential to diminish anchoring effects. However, the market is not needed: our anchoring manipulation failed in a large sample. In a concise meta-analysis, we identify the circumstances under which anchoring effects of preferences can be expected.

LIONESS Lab is a free web-based platform for interactive online experiments. An intuitive, user-friendly graphical interface enables researchers to develop, test, and share experiments online, with minimal need for programming experience. LIONESS Lab provides solutions for the methodological challenges of interactive online experimentation, including ways to reduce waiting time, form groups on-the-fly, and deal with participant dropout. We highlight key features of the software, and show how it meets the challenges of conducting interactive experiments online.