People can get most of their needs broadly satisfied in two ways: by close communal ties and by dealings with people in the marketplace. These modes of relating-termed communal and market-often necessitate qualitatively different motives, behaviors, and mind-sets. We reasoned that activating market mode would produce behaviors consistent with it and impair behaviors consistent with communal mod...

Public generosity may be a means to convincingly advertise one's good character. This hypothesis suggests that altruistic individuals will be desirable as romantic partners. Few studies have tested this prediction, and these showed mixed results. Some studies have found that altruism is not particularly attractive; other studies showed that altruism is attractive by contrasting descriptions of ...

Does participation in a tournament influence prosocial behaviour in subsequent interactions? We designed an experiment to collect data on charitable donations made by participants out of their earnings from a real-effort tournament. We varied the earnings associated with ranks across our treatments thereby allowing us to observe donations by participants who end up at different ranks but have t...

This study investigates the capacity of hospitals to vary the intensity of their services based on patients' expected sources of payment. While the concept of price discrimination by hospitals based on payer generosity ("cost-shifting") has been discussed extensively, the notion that hospitals can adjust payer-specific marginal costs to reflect differences in reimbursement policies has not been...

In this paper, we investigate the effect of increased benefits on claim duration and claim costs in temporary disability claims of workers’ compensation. While previous studies have focused on natural experiments created by one-time large changes in minimum or maximum weekly benefits, we focus on the kink in benefit generosity inherent in all workers’ compensation systems in the United States. ...

Building on recent work by Rosenzweig (1999), this paper re-examines the effect of AFDC benefits on early non-marital childbearing. Unlike most previous work in this area, Rosenzweig finds a statistically significant and quantitatively large positive effect of AFDC benefits. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we replicate Rosenzweig’s analysis and explore the reasons his findin...

Generosity is an important behavior enriching human society and can be observed across cultures. However, generosity has been shown to be modulated as a function of social distance, also referred to as social discounting. Oxytocin and empathy are other factors that have been shown to play an important role in generous behavior. However, how exactly oxytocin and empathy impact social discounting...