Suchergebnisse

We show that temporally distancing the decision task from the payment of the reward increases honest behavior. Each of 427 Israeli soldiers fulfilling their mandatory military service rolled a six-sided die in private and reported the outcome to the unit's cadet coordinator. For every point reported, the soldier received an additional half-hour early release from the army base on Thursday afternoon. Soldiers who participated on Sunday (the first work day of the week) are significantly more honest than those who participated later in the week. We derive practical implications for eliciting honesty.

Abstract
Time-consuming and costly religious rituals pose a puzzle for economists committed to rational choice theories of human behavior. We propose that either through selection or a causal relationship, the performance of religious rituals is associated with higher levels of cooperation. To test this hypothesis we design field experiments to measure the in-group cooperative behavior of members of religious and secular Israeli kibbutzim, communal societies for which mutual cooperation is a matter of survival. Our results show that religious males (the primary practitioners of collective religious ritual in Orthodox Judaism) are more cooperative than religious females, secular males and secular females. Moreover, the frequency with which religious males engage in collective religious rituals predicts well their degree of cooperative behavior.

AbstractWe study the factors associated with compliance with social‐distancing regulations using a unique data set on the behaviour of Ontarians during the COVID‐19 pandemic. To start, we build a simple theoretical model of social distancing in order to understand how some individual and community‐level factors influence compliance. We test our model's predictions by designing and conducting a survey on Ontarians in June and July 2020 in which we elicit their degree of compliance with existing distancing regulations as well as alternative policies such as fines for non‐compliance and wage subsidies for staying at home. Consistent with our model, we find that variables related to one's risk of infection (e.g., pre‐existing health condition, age, necessity of working outside the home and regional COVID‐19 cases) are significant predictors of compliance as are gender, political beliefs, risk and time preferences. To boost compliance among those who are young, healthy or apartment dwellers, we demonstrate the effectiveness of fines and wage subsidies.