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 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 explore gender attitudes towards competition in the United Arab Emirates—a traditionally patriarchal society which in recent times has adopted numerous policies to empower women and promote their role in the labor force. The experimental treatments vary whether individuals compete in single-sex or mixed-sex groups. In contrast to previous studies, women in our sample are not less willing to compete than men. In fact, once we control for individual performance, Emirati women are more likely to select into competition. Our analysis shows that neither women nor men shy away from competition, and both compete more than what would be optimal in monetary terms as the fraction of men in their group increases. We offer a detailed survey of the literature and discuss possible reasons for the lack of gender differences in our experiment.

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.

By means of a laboratory experiment, Rubin and Sheremeta (Manag Sci 62(4):985–999, 2016), study a bonus-version of the gift-exchange game, including two treatment variations. First they vary whether the effort provided by the agent directly translates into output for the principal, or whether it is distorted by a shock. Second, for the condition with a shock they vary whether the shock is observed by the principal, or not. The authors’ main findings are that (1) the introduction of an unobservable shock significantly reduces welfare; and (2) informing the principal about the size of the shock does not restore gift-exchange. In a replication study we largely reproduce finding (1), but we fail to confirm finding (2). Our data suggests that small behavioral differences in the initial rounds lead to a hysteresis effect that is responsible for the differences in results across studies.

For simple prospects routinely used for certainty equivalent elicitation, random expected utility preferences imply a conditional expectation function that can mimic deterministic rank-dependent preferences. That is, a subject with random expected utility preferences can have expected certainty equivalents exactly like those predicted by rank-dependent probability weighting functions of the inverse-s shape discussed by Quiggin (J Econ Behav Organ 3:323–343, 1982) and advocated by Tversky and Kahneman (J Risk Uncertainty 5:297–323, 1992), Prelec (Econometrica 66:497–527, 1998) and other scholars. Certainty equivalents may not nonparametrically identify preferences: Their conditional expectation (and critically, their interpretation) depends on assumptions concerning the source of their variability.

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.

Since Holt and Laury (Am Econ Rev 92(5):1644–1655, 2002), the multiple price list (MPL) procedure has widely been used to elicit individual risk preferences. We assess the impact of varying list order and spacing, and of presentation via text or graphs. Relative to the original MPL baseline, some non-linear transformations of lottery prices systematically increase elicited risk aversion, while some graphical displays tend to reduce it.