Lata Gangadharan

Heterogeneous returns from contributions to a public good create a normative conflict between equality and efficiency. In a laboratory experiment, we proposed an indicative menu of contribution principles, including one featuring a decentralized redistribution mechanism ensuring earnings equality in exchange for fully efficient contributions. Although a majority of individuals, when in the position of an impartial observer, considered this principle to be the most appropriate and expected others to agree, they failed to act on it. Designating a leader who endorsed this principle and made non-binding recommendations enabled a majority of groups to adopt it successfully. This resulted in full contributions and earnings equalization through redistribution from advantaged to disadvantaged members, effectively resolving the conflict.

This study examines whether adherence to advice depends on an advisor's identity and status beyond message content. Using a survey experiment with over 3000 farmers in India, we find that individuals are more likely to follow advice in a social dilemma game when it comes from high-status or in-group advisors, even when the advice diverges from prevailing norms. Admired role models can attenuate the influence of status and identity, though their beneficial effect is not universal. Our experimental findings align with evidence from an agricultural advisory program involving the same participant sample, highlighting the broader real-world relevance of these patterns.

Together with private transfers, centralized redistribution policies form the backbone of social welfare systems worldwide. Examining their interplay is therefore crucial for understanding and addressing inequality. We investigate the relationship between private transfers and public redistribution policies using an experiment with nearly 4000 participants from Germany, India, Indonesia and the USA. The experiment creates large inequalities, then introduces one of four centralized redistribution regimes to address the inequality. Our findings reveal that no redistribution policy changes private pro-social or anti-social transfers, compared to an environment without centralized redistribution. Structural estimates show that egotistic, rather than social motives drive private transfers, and that inequality aversion is unaffected by redistribution policies, thus explaining the lack of a private response. This suggests that governments possess an additional degree of freedom in pursuing social safety nets.

Donations are often made through charitable intermediaries that can fund themselves from these same donations. After intermediation, only a fraction of the amount donated may reach the intended beneficiary. The price of charitable output is therefore higher after intermediation than if donors donated directly toward the end cause. At the same time, this price is hidden from donors since they cannot verify how much intermediaries pass on. We show that while donors reduce their donation in intermediation itself, and also reduce their donation because they expect the price of charitable output to increase, both reactions are either fully or partly compensated by their ethical preferences for the recipient’s rights. Charitable output, therefore, can be a Giffen-good.

The recent stated preference literature emphasises the importance of incentive compatible elicitation methods, which depend on respondent beliefs that payment can be collected if provision occurs. We investigate this condition in a randomised field experiment where stated choices are incentivised financially. The objective of the treatment was to make choices salient by making each decision financially relevant and to increase the respondents' beliefs that future payments will be enforced. Our results show that the treatment increases estimates of the marginal utility of income, with the effect being economically and statistically significant for low‐income respondents. We develop a stylised theoretical framework that allows us to quantify the bias that is implied by the observed differences between the treated and control groups. We find that failure to account for respondents' doubts about payment coercion in an otherwise well‐designed survey inflates the marginal willingness to pay among low‐income respondents by a factor of at least 1.72.

Decision makers in positions of power often make unobserved choices under risk and uncertainty. In many cases, they face a trade-off between maximizing their own payoff and those of other individuals. What inferences are made in such instances about their choices when only outcomes are observable? We conduct two experiments that investigate whether outcomes are attributed to luck or choices. Decision makers choose between two investment options, where the more costly option has a higher chance of delivering a good outcome (that is, a higher payoff) for the group. We show that attribution biases exist in the evaluation of good outcomes. On average, good outcomes of decision makers are attributed more to luck as compared to bad outcomes. This asymmetry implies that decision makers get too little credit for their successes. The biases are exhibited by those individuals who make or would make the less prosocial choice for the group as decision makers, suggesting that a consensus effect may be shaping both the belief formation and updating processes.

This paper highlights the contributions made by lab-in-the-field experiments, which are also known as artefactual, framed and extra-lab experiments. We present a curated sample of lab-in-the-field experiments and discuss how they can be conducted on their own or combined with conventional laboratory experiments, natural experiments, randomised control trials and surveys to provide unique insights into the behaviour of a diverse population. Using our recent research on gender and leadership, we demonstrate how lab-in-the-field experiments have offered new perspectives about gender differences in decision-making. Finally, we outline the ethical and implementational challenges researchers may face while conducting these experiments and share some of the strategies we employed to address them.