Trust beliefs are heterogeneous across individuals and, at the same time, persistent across generations. We investigate one mechanism yielding these dual patterns: false consensus. In the context of a trust game experiment, we show that individuals extrapolate from their own type when forming trust beliefs about the same pool of potential partners i.e., more (less) trustworthy individuals form ...

We analyze a model of wage payment practices in which strategic complementarities arise because each employer’s costs of delaying wages decrease with the arrears in its labor market. The model is estimated on panel data for workers and firms in Russia, facilitating identification through fixed effects for employees, employers, and local labor markets, and instrumental variables based on policy ...

Commitment to Self-Rewards Self-administered rewards are ubiquitous. They serve as incentives for personal accomplishments and are widely recommended as tools for overcoming self-control problems. However, it seems puzzling why self-rewards can work: the prospect of a reward has a motivating force only if the threat of self-denial of the reward after low performance is credible. We explain how ...

Melanoma associated-A antigens (MAGE-A) are silent in normal tissues except testis. However, they are activated ina variety of different tumors. Thus, their expression is highly specific to cancer cells. Reverse transcription-nested polymerase chain reaction (RT-nPCR) is a highly sensitive technique that has been used successfully for the detection of MAGE genes in tissue samples. The aim of th...

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a standard method of measurement for social capital. Various authors have investigated the influence of social capital on economic growth but still social capital has not been measured in any satisfactory way. So far, each survey has used its own ad hoc methodology due to the heterogeneity of the very definition of the concept of social capital. A consens...

In a simple conceptual framework, we organize a multitude of phenomena related to the (mis)prediction of utility. Consequences in terms of distorted choices and lower wellbeing emerge if people have to trade-off between alternatives that are characterized by attributes satisfying extrinsic desires and alternatives serving intrinsic needs. Thereby the neglect of asymmetries in adaptation is prop...

Brides for Sale: Cross-Border Marriages and Female Immigration Every year, a large number of women immigrate as brides from developing countries to developed countries in East Asia. This phenomenon virtually did not exist in the early 1990s, but foreign brides currently comprise 4 to 35 percent of newlyweds in these developed Asian countries. This paper argues that two factors account for this ...

Ofer H. Azar* Department of Economics Northwestern University June 2003 Abstract The paper presents a model of the evolution of social norms. When a norm is costly to follow and people do not derive benefits from following it except for avoiding social disapproval, the norm erodes over time. Tip percentages, however, increased over the years, suggesting that people derive benefits from tipping,...

A large market economy has a huge number of degrees of freedom with weak microlevel coordination. The ‘implicit microfoundations’ approach considers this property of micro-level interactions to more strongly determine macro-level outcomes compared to the precise details of individual choice behavior; that is, the ‘particle’ nature of individuals dominates their ‘mechanical’ nature. So rather th...

Whitman argues that group selection is consistent with methodological individualism. He begins by defining a weak form of methodological individualism in which agents are not necessarily self-interested or rational and shows that this form of is consistent with Sober and Wilson’s model of group selection. However, Sober and Wilson’s group selection is also consistent with a methodological indiv...