Tax Morale and Compliance Behavior: First Evidence on a Causal Link Recent literature on tax evasion emphasizes the importance of moral considerations to explain compliance behavior. As a consequence scholars aim to identify factors that shape this so-called tax morale. However, the causal link between tax morale and actual compliance behavior is not established yet. Exploiting exogenous variat...

Our research is a variant of the third party punishment game that we call Solomon’s Game. The main feature of this game is that players can not only punish unfair people but also help those individuals who are the victims of that unfairness. The aim of this experiment is to compare the human tendency to punish unfair behavior to the desire to help victims of that unfairness, in presence of a bu...

We examine the characteristics of effective leaders in a simple leader-follower voluntary contributions game. We focus on two factors: the individual’s cooperativeness and the individual’s beliefs about the cooperativeness of others. We find that groups perform best when led by those who are cooperatively inclined. Partly, this reflects a false consensus effect: cooperative leaders are more opt...

Empirical research suggests that rather than improving incentives exerting control can reduce workers’ performance by eroding motivation. The present paper shows that intention-based reciprocity can cause such motivational crowding-out if individuals differ in their propensity for reciprocity and preferences are private information. Not being controlled might then be considered to be kind, beca...

The constrained egalitarian solution of Dutta and Ray (1989) for TUgames is extended to asymmetric cases, using the notion of weight systems as in Kalai and Samet (1987,1988). This weighted constrained egalitarian solution is based on the weighted Lorenz-criterion as an inequality measure. It is shown that in general there is at most one such weighted egalitarian solution for TU-games. Existenc...

This essay reflects the thoughts and experience of two staff members. Mark Allen has been a resident representative in both Poland (1990–93) and Hungary (1996–1998), two countries that have moved well along the road of transformation. Rick Haas was the resident representative in Belarus (1996–98), a country where much remains to be done. In some respects they had similar experiences, in others ...

Some people have a concern for a fair distribution of incomes while others do not. Does such a concern matter for majority voting on redistribution? Fairness preferences are relevant for redistribution outcomes only if fair-minded voters are pivotal. Pivotality, in turn, depends on the structure of income classes. We experimentally study voting on redistribution between two income classes and s...

Most professional economists believe that economist in general are more selfish than other persons and that this greater selfishness is due to economic education. In this paper we offer empirical evidence against this widely held belief. Using a unique data set about giving behaviour to two social funds at the University of Zurich, it is shown that economic training does not make people act mor...

We model group formation as a response to relative deprivation. We employ a simple measure of relative deprivation. We show that the process of deprivationinduced self-selection into groups reaches a unique steady state. We study the social welfare implications of the deprivation-induced process of group formation and show that when individuals are left to pursue their betterment the resulting ...

We study the effect that the possibility of investing in cultural education has on the voluntary contributions to a cultural good. This is done in a two-stage public-good experiment. We also provide treatments with different context in order to control for a possible framing effect. Our results show the absence of an effect of cultural education on the contributions to the cultural good and a s...