This article describes the Australian Twins Economic Preferences Survey (ATEPS). The data set comprises a wide variety of preference and behavioral measures (risk aversion, impatience, ambiguity aversion, trust, confidence) elicited using incentivized decision tasks. One-thousand one-hundred twenty Australian adult twins (560 pairs) completed the survey, making it one of the largest data sets containing incentivized preference measures of twins. As the survey was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, we also collected information on experiences related to the pandemic, along with a variety of questions on political attitudes and mental wellbeing. We hope that ATEPS can make a valuable contribution to social science and genetics research.

The relationship between firms’ owners and managers is a quintessential example of costly principal–agent interaction. Optimal design of monetary incentives and supervision mechanisms are the two traditional ways of reducing agency costs in this relationship. In this paper, we show evidence which is consistent with a third mechanism: firms have managers whose economic preferences are aligned with owners' interests. We uncover differences in economic preferences between managers employed in firms controlled by two distinct classes of ‘patrons’: employee-owned firms (worker cooperatives) and conventional investor-owned firms. In a high-stakes lab-in-the-field experiment, we find that co-op managers are less risk-loving and more altruistic than their conventional counterparts. We do not observe differences between the two groups in terms of time preferences, reciprocity, and trust. Our findings are consistent with existing evidence on worker cooperatives, such as their tendency to self-select into less risky industries and their compressed compensation structures.

Why do some post-communist countries regularly experience democratic overturn of power while others do not? This article analyzes the role of authoritarianism, adopting a novel approach concentrating on three separate dimensions (authoritarian submission, conventionalism, authoritarian aggression). Examining Montenegro, a country that has not changed its incumbent government since the breakdown of communism, the article argues that authoritarian submission, which stands for an obedient relationship to a political authority, is a relevant factor for the domination of a single party—the Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS). I test my assumptions using two surveys: the Montenegrin National Elections Study (2016) and a self-designed student survey. Notwithstanding the Montenegrin and Serb ethnic cleavage and economic preferences that remain significant for voting patterns, findings from both analyses confirm that submissive tendencies are important for voting behavior both for the national sample and for the educated young. This emphasizes the importance of psychological factors and the need to break submissive mindsets for successful democratic transformation in post-communist countries.