Shachar Kariv

• University of California, Berkeley

Importance Altruism—putting the patient first—is a fundamental component of physician professionalism. Evidence is lacking about the relationship between physician altruism, care quality, and spending. Objective To determine whether there is a relationship between physician altruism, measures of quality, and spending, hypothesizing that altruistic...

This paper estimates how overall consumer spending responds to changes in gasoline prices. It uses the differential impact across consumers of the sharp drop in gasoline prices in 2014 for identification. This estimation strategy is implemented using comprehensive, high-frequency, transaction-level data for a large panel of individuals. The average...

We study the distributional preferences of Americans during 2013–2016, a period of social and economic upheaval. We decompose preferences into two qualitatively different tradeoffs—fair-mindedness versus self-interest, and equality versus efficiency—and measure both at the individual level in a large and diverse sample. Although Americans are heter...

Low liquidity and a high marginal propensity to consume are tightly linked. This paper analyzes this link in the context of income tax withholding and refunds. A theory of rational cash management with income uncertainty endogenizes the relationship between illiquidity and the marginal propensity to consume, and can explain the finding that househo...

Physicians' professional ethics require that they put patients' interests ahead of their own and that they should allocate limited medical resources efficiently. Understanding physicians' extent of adherence to these principles requires understanding the social preferences that lie behind them. These social preferences may be divided into two quali...

Using comprehensive account records, this paper examines how individuals adjusted spending and saving in response to a temporary drop in liquidity due to the 2013 U.S. government shutdown. The shutdown cut paychecks by 40% for affected employees, which was recovered within 2 weeks. Because the shutdown affected only the timing of payments, it provi...

Significance This paper advances scientific understanding of social preference—a topic of longstanding cross-disciplinary interest—by studying the preferences of future physicians. In making treatment decisions, physicians make fundamental tradeoffs between their own (financial) self-interest, patient benefit, and stewardship of social resources. T...

We document the relationship between distributional preferences and voting decisions in a large and diverse sample of Americans. Using a generalized dictator game, we generate individual-level measures of fair-mindedness (the weight on oneself versus others) and equality-efficiency tradeoffs. Subjects' equality-efficiency tradeoffs predict their po...

Few thoughts for those with the most A weighty scholarly tome has sparked a year-long public discussion of the unevenness of income and wealth distributions in the United States. In essence, a few people have a lot of both. Moral philosophers and economists have argued for centuries about the tradeoffs in life strategy that might explain wealth imb...

To better understand how support for redistributive policies is shaped by macroeconomic shocks, we explore how distributional preferences changed during the recent “Great Recession.” We conducted identical modified dictator games during both the recession and the preceding economic boom. The experiments capture subjects’ selfishness (the weight on...

Using comprehensive account records, this paper examines how individuals respond to a temporary drop in income following the 2013 U.S. Federal Government shutdown. Affected employees saw their income decline by 40% on average, which was recovered within two weeks. Despite having no effect on lifetime earnings, spending dropped sharply, implying a n...

Balancing your incomings and outgoings Economic theory predicts that when someone receives money should have little effect on their spending patterns. Gelman et al. constructed a data set of 60 million transactions made by 75,000 people to test this theory. People do seem to go on a mini–spending spree after they get their paychecks or pensions. Ho...

Definitive judgment about the quality of decision-making is made difficult by twin problems of measurement and identification. A measure of decision-making quality is hard to formalize, to quantify, and to make practical for use in a variety of choice environments; and it is difficult to distinguish differences in decisionmaking quality from unobse...

Following Fehr and Gäechter (Am Econ Rev 90(4):980–994, 2000), a large and growing number of experiments show that public goods can be provided at high levels when mutual monitoring and costly punishment are allowed. Nearly all experiments, however, study monitoring and punishment in a complete network where all subjects can monitor and punish each...

Revealed preference theory offers a criterion for decision-making quality: if decisions are high quality then there exists a utility function that the choices maximize. We conduct a large-scale field experiment that enables us to test subjects' choices for consistency with utility maximization and to combine the experimental data with a wide range...

Recent experiments show that public goods can be provided at high levels when mutual monitoring and costly punishment are allowed. All these experiments, however, study monitoring and punishment in a setting where all agents can monitor and punish each other (i.e., in a complete network). The architecture of social networks becomes important when i...

Social learning describes any situation in which individuals learn by observing the behavior of others. In the real world, however, individuals learn not just by observing the actions of others but also from seeking advice. This paper introduces advice giving into the standard social-learning experiment of Çelen and Kariv (Çelen, B., S. Kariv. 2005...

A monotone game is an extensive-form game with complete information, simultaneous moves and an irreversibility structure on strategies. It captures a variety of situations in which players make partial commitments and allows us to characterize conditions under which equilibria result in socially desirable outcomes. However, since the game has many...

We study the impact of exposure to ideology on distributional pref- erences in the context of modified Dictator Games that vary the price of giving. We exploiting a natural experiment in education — ran- dom assignment to first-term instructors at the Yale Law School — in order to distinguish the self-selection into a discipline from the learn- ing...

‘Social learning’ is a process whereby economic agents learn by observing the behaviour of others. ‘Social learning in networks’ requires sophistication because individuals draw inferences from the behaviour of agents they cannot directly observe. Theoretical research suggests that, even if networks are very incomplete, social learning leads to uni...

We report a laboratory experiment that enables us to estimate four prominent models of ambiguity aversion — Subjective Expected Utility (SEU), Maxmin Expected Utility (MEU), Recursive Expected Utility (REU), and α-Maxmin Expected Utility (α-MEU) — at the level of the individual subject. We employ graphical representations of three-dimensional budge...

This paper reports the results of an experimental investigation of monotone games with imperfect information. Players are located at the nodes of a network and observe the actions of other players only if they are connected by the network. These games have many sequential equilibria; nonetheless, the behavior of subjects in the laboratory is predic...

Individuals living in society are bound together by a social network and, in many social and economic situations, individuals learn by observing the behavior of others in their local environment. This process is called social learning. Learning in incomplete networks, where different individuals have different information, is especially challenging...

This paper reports an experimental study of trading networks. Networks are incomplete in the sense that each trader can only exchange assets with a limited number of other traders. The greater the incompleteness of the network, the more intermediation is required to transfer the assets between initial and final owners. The uncertainty of trade in n...

By using graphical representations of budget sets over bundles of state-contingent commodities, we generate a very rich data set well-suited to studying behavior under uncertainty at the level of the individual subject. We test the data for consistency with the maximization hypothesis, and we estimate preferences using a two-parameter utility funct...

We utilize graphical representations of Dictator Games which generate rich individual- level data. Our baseline experiment employs budget sets over feasible payoff- pairs. We test these data for consistency with utility maximization, and we recover the underlying preferences for giving (trade-offs between own payoffs and the payoffs of others). Two...

By using graphical representations of simple portfolio choice problems, we generate a very rich dataset to study behavior under uncertainty at the level of the individual subject. We test the data for consistency with the maximization hypothesis, and we estimate preferences using a two-parameter utility function based on Faruk Gul (1991). This spec...

Social learning is the process of individuals learning by observing the actions of others. In the real world, however, although people learn by observing the actions of others, they also learn from advice. This paper introduces advice giving into a standard social-learning problem. The experiment is designed so that both pieces of information ? act...

Corruption in the public sector erodes tax compliance and leads to higher tax evasion. Moreover, corrupt public officials abuse their public power to extort bribes from the private agents. In both types of interaction with the public sector, the private agents are bound to face uncertainty with respect to their disposable incomes. To analyse effect...

We report a laboratory experiment that enables us to distinguish preferences for altruism (concerning tradeoffs between own payoffs and the payoffs of others) from social preferences (concerning tradeoffs between the payoffs of others). By using graphical representations of three-person Dictator Games that vary the relative prices of giving, we gen...

Nearly all observational learning models assume that individuals can observe all the decisions that have previously been made. In reality, such perfect information is rarely available. To explore the difference between observational learning under perfect and imperfect information, this paper takes an experimental look at a situation in which indiv...

This paper reports a rigorous experimental test of Pareto-damaging behaviors. We introduce a new graphical representation of dictator games with step-shaped sets of feasible payoffs to persons self and other on which strongly Pareto efficient allocations involve substantial inequality. The non-convexity and sharp nonlinearity of the Pareto frontier...

Corruption in the public sector erodes tax compliance and leads to higher tax evasion. Moreover, corrupt public officials abuse their public power to extort bribes from the private agents. In both types of interaction with the public sector, the private agents are bound to face uncertainty with respect to their disposable incomes. To analyse effect...

Networks are natural tools for understanding social and economic phe-nomena. For example, all markets are characterized by agents connected by complex, multilateral information networks, and the network structure influences economic outcomes. In an earlier study, we undertook an exper-imental investigation of learning in various three-person networ...

This paper reports an experimental test of how individuals learn from the behavior of others. By using techniques only available in the laboratory, we elicit subjects' beliefs. This allows us to distinguish informational cascades from herd behavior. By adding a setup with continuous signal and discrete action, we enrich the ball-andurn observationa...

Corruption in the public sector erodes tax compliance and leads to higher tax evasion. Moreover, corrupt public officials abuse their public power to extort bribes from the private agents. In both types of interaction with the public sector, the private agents are bound to face uncertainty with respect to their disposable incomes. To analyse effect...

Individuals living in society are bound together by a social network, the complex of relationships that brings them into contact with other agents. In many social and economic situations, individuals learn by observing the behavior of others in their local environment. This process is called social learning. Learning in incomplete networks, where d...

This paper studies how individuals learn by observing the behav- ior of predecessors as well as from their advice. What we find is a truly puzzling result that we call the advice paradox. This paradox can be stated as follows: subjects in a laboratory social learning sit- uation played with and without advice appear to be more willing to follow the...

We study the perfect Bayesian equilibrium of a model of learning over a general social network. Each individual receives a signal about the underlying state of the world, observes the past actions of a stochastically-generated neighborhood of individuals, and chooses one of two possible actions. The stochastic process generating the neighborhoods d...

Social learning is the process of individuals learning by observing the actions of others. In the real world, however, although people learn by observing the actions of others, they also learn from advice. This paper introduces advice giving into a standard social-learning problem. The experiment is designed so that both pieces of information - act...