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This paper examines the effects of school curricula on subsequent preference formation. The estimation results, using Japanese data, show that the actual curriculum at public elementary schools varies widely from area to area and is associated with preference formation. Specifically, pupils who have experienced participatory/cooperative learning practices are more likely to be altruistic, cooperative with others, reciprocal, and have national pride. In contrast, the influence of education emphasizing more on anti-competitive practices is negatively associated with these attributes. Such contrasts can also be seen for other preferences regarding government policies and a market economy. The findings imply that elementary school education, as a place for early socialization, plays an important role in the formation of life-long social preferences.

AbstractMonopsony power by firms and social preferences by consumers are well established. We analyze how wages and employment change in a monopsony if workers compare their income with that of a reference group. We show that the undistorted, competitive outcome may no longer constitute the benchmark for welfare comparisons and derive a condition that guarantees that the monopsony distortion is exactly balanced by the impact of social comparisons. We also demonstrate how wage restrictions and subsidies or taxes can be used to ensure this condition, both for a welfarist and a paternalistic welfare objective.

We study a classic mechanism design problem: How to organize trade between two privately informed parties. We characterize an optimal mechanism under selfish preferences and present experimental evidence that, under such a mechanism, a non-negligible fraction of individuals deviates from the intended behavior. We show that this can be explained by models of social preferences and introduce the notion of a social-preference-robust mechanism. We characterize an optimal mechanism in this class and present experimental evidence that it successfully controls behavior. We finally show that this mechanism is more profitable only if deviations from selfish behavior are sufficiently frequent.