Household reduction of gas consumption in the energy crisis is not explained by individual economic incentives.

In response to the disruption of gas supplies from Russia following the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, European politicians and public utilities appealed to citizens and customers to conserve natural gas. Moreover, they strengthened economic incentives for gas conservation. In fact, a substantial amount of natural gas was saved during the winter of 2022/23.

The politicized pandemic: Ideological polarization and the behavioral response to COVID-19.

In a representative sample of the U.S. population during the first summer of the COVID-19 pandemic, we investigate how prosociality and ideology interact in their relationship with health-protecting behavior and trust in the government to handle the crisis.

Grit increases strongly in early childhood and is related to parental background.

Grit has been identified as a very important non-cognitive skill that is positively related to educational achievements and labor market success. Recently, it has also been found to be malleable through interventions in primary schools. Yet, little is still known about its development in early childhood and the influence of family background.

COVID-19 within families amplifies the prosociality gap between adolescents of high and low socioeconomic status.

COVID-19 has had worse health, education, and labor market effects on groups with low socioeconomic status (SES) than on those with high SES. Little is known, however, about whether COVID-19 has also had differential effects on noncognitive skills that are important for life outcomes. Using panel data from before and during the pandemic, we show that COVID-19 affects one key noncognitive skill, that is, prosociality.

National parochialism is ubiquitous across 42 nations around the world.

Cooperation within and across borders is of paramount importance for the provision of public goods. Parochialism - the tendency to cooperate more with ingroup than outgroup members - limits contributions to global public goods. National parochialism (i.

Generosity and cooperation across the life span: A lab-in-the-field study.

Understanding persistence and changes in prosociality across the life span is fundamental to inform theory and practice. As life expectancy increases and pressing societal challenges demand increasing generosity and cooperation among individuals, it is crucial to understand intergenerational interactions. We present the findings from a novel lab-in-the-field experiment (N = 359, 18-90 years) that examines generosity and cooperation between generations.

Political ideology, cooperation and national parochialism across 42 nations.

Political ideology has been hypothesized to be associated with cooperation and national parochialism (i.e. greater cooperation with members of one's nation), with liberals thought to have more cooperation with strangers and less national parochialism, compared to conservatives.

Where to look for the morals in markets?

There is a heated debate on whether markets erode social responsibility and moral behavior. However, it is a challenging task to identify and measure moral behavior in markets. Based on a theoretical model, we examine in an experiment the relation between trading volume, prices and moral behavior by setting up markets that either impose a negative externality on third parties or not.

Biocarriers facilitated gravity-driven membrane (GDM) reactor for wastewater reclamation: Effect of intermittent aeration cycle.

This study investigated the performances of gravity-driven membrane (GDM) reactors integrated with granule activated carbon (GAC) biofilm process for wastewater treatment under different intermittent aeration cycles (intensity and frequency). The results showed the removal efficiencies of dissolved organic carbon, total nitrogen, ammonia were significantly improved under intermittent aeration conditions (~86-87%, ~29-37%, and ~83-99%, respectively) compared to non-aeration condition (~72% and ~18%, and ~17%, respectively). In addition, it was found that the intermittent aeration significantly reduced the cake layer resistance and therefore improved ~130-300% the permeate flux compared to control without aeration.

Genome-wide association analyses of risk tolerance and risky behaviors in over 1 million individuals identify hundreds of loci and shared genetic influences.

Humans vary substantially in their willingness to take risks. In a combined sample of over 1 million individuals, we conducted genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of general risk tolerance, adventurousness, and risky behaviors in the driving, drinking, smoking, and sexual domains. Across all GWAS, we identified hundreds of associated loci, including 99 loci associated with general risk tolerance.

Closing the gender gap in competitiveness through priming.

Men have been observed to have a greater willingness to compete compared to women, and it is possible that this contributes to gender differences in wages and career advancement. Policy interventions such as quotas are sometimes used to remedy this but these may cause unintended side-effects. Here, we present experimental evidence that a simple and practically costless tool-priming subjects with power-can close the gender gap in competitiveness.

Market Residence Principle: Experimental Evidence on the Effects of a Financial Transaction Tax.

The effects of a financial transaction tax (FTT) are scientifically disputed, as seemingly small details of its implementation may matter a lot. In this article, we provide experimental evidence on the different effects of an FTT, depending on whether it is implemented as a tax on markets, on residents, or a combination of both. We find that a tax on markets has negative effects on volatility and trading volume, whereas a tax on residents shows none of these undesired effects.

How Social Preferences Shape Incentives in (Experimental) Markets for Credence Goods.

Credence goods markets suffer from inefficiencies caused by superior information of sellers about the surplus-maximising quality. While standard theory predicts that equal mark-up prices solve the credence goods problem if customers can verify the quality received, experimental evidence indicates the opposite. We identify a lack of robustness with respect to heterogeneity in social preferences as a possible cause of this and conduct new experiments that allow for parsimonious identification of sellers' social preference types.

Insurance coverage of customers induces dishonesty of sellers in markets for credence goods.

Honesty is a fundamental pillar for cooperation in human societies and thus for their economic welfare. However, humans do not always act in an honest way. Here, we examine how insurance coverage affects the degree of honesty in credence goods markets.

Revealed distributional preferences: Individuals vs. teams.

We compare experimentally the revealed distributional preferences of individuals and teams in allocation tasks. We find that teams are significantly more benevolent than individuals in the domain of disadvantageous inequality while the benevolence in the domain of advantageous inequality is similar across decision makers. A consequence for the frequency of preference types is that while a substantial fraction of individuals is classified as inequality averse, this type disappears completely in teams.

The neural basis of deception in strategic interactions.

Communication based on informational asymmetries abounds in politics, business, and almost any other form of social interaction. Informational asymmetries may create incentives for the better-informed party to exploit her advantage by misrepresenting information. Using a game-theoretic setting, we investigate the neural basis of deception in human interaction.

Strategic sophistication of individuals and teams. Experimental evidence.

Many important decisions require strategic sophistication. We examine experimentally whether teams act more strategically than individuals. We let individuals and teams make choices in simple games, and also elicit first- and second-order beliefs.

Third-party punishment increases cooperation in children through (misaligned) expectations and conditional cooperation.

The human ability to establish cooperation, even in large groups of genetically unrelated strangers, depends upon the enforcement of cooperation norms. Third-party punishment is one important factor to explain high levels of cooperation among humans, although it is still somewhat disputed whether other animal species also use this mechanism for promoting cooperation. We study the effectiveness of third-party punishment to increase children's cooperative behavior in a large-scale cooperation game.

Shaping beliefs in experimental markets for expert services: Guilt aversion and the impact of promises and money-burning options.

In a credence goods game with an expert and a consumer, we study experimentally the impact of two devices that are predicted to induce consumer-friendly behavior if the expert has a propensity to feel guilty when he believes that he violates the consumer's payoff expectations: (i) an opportunity for the expert to make a non-binding promise; and (ii) an opportunity for the consumer to burn money. In belief-based guilt aversion theory the first opportunity shapes an expert's behavior if an appropriate promise is made and if it is expected to be believed by the consumer; by contrast, the second opportunity might change behavior even though this option is never used along the predicted path. Experimental results confirm the behavioral relevance of (i) but fail to confirm (ii).

What do I want and when do I want it: brain correlates of decisions made for self and other.

A number of recent functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies on intertemporal choice behavior have demonstrated that so-called emotion- and reward-related brain areas are preferentially activated by decisions involving immediately available (but smaller) rewards as compared to (larger) delayed rewards. This pattern of activation was not seen, however, when intertemporal choices were made for another (unknown) individual, which speaks to that activation having been triggered by self-relatedness. In the present fMRI study, we investigated the brain correlates of individuals who passively observed intertemporal choices being made either for themselves or for an unknown person.

Distributional preferences and competitive behavior.

We study experimentally the relationship between distributional preferences and competitive behavior. We find that spiteful subjects react strongest to competitive pressure and win in a tournament significantly more often than efficiency-minded and inequality averse subjects. However, when given the choice between a tournament and a piece rate scheme, efficiency-minded subjects choose the tournament most often, while spiteful and inequality averse subjects avoid it.

Affirmative action policies promote women and do not harm efficiency in the laboratory.

Gender differences in choosing to enter competitions are one source of unequal labor market outcomes concerning wages and promotions. Given that studying the effects of policy interventions to support women is difficult with field data because of measurement problems and potential lack of control, we evaluated, in a set of controlled laboratory experiments, four interventions: quotas, where one of two winners of a competition must be female; two variants of preferential treatment, where a fixed increment is added to women's performance; and repetition of the competition, where a second competition takes place if no woman is among the winners. Compared with no intervention, all interventions encourage women to enter competitions more often, and performance is at least equally good, both during and after the competition.

What is for me is not for you: brain correlates of intertemporal choice for self and other.

People have present-biased preferences: they choose more impatiently when choosing between an immediate reward and a delayed reward, than when choosing between a delayed reward and a more delayed reward. Following McClure et al. [McClure, S.