Attention. Identity. Choice.

Inequality in wealth, income, and opportunities based on natural identities, especially
caste and gender, is widespread. One policy tool to “level the playing field” is Affirmative
Action (AA) policies. Previous research has shown that AA policies effectively increase
beneficiaries’ willingness to compete. However, most studies focus on resource heterogeneity
between groups, even though significant differences exist within groups. That is, a “creamy
layer” exists, a term coined by sociologists to refer to society’s wealthy, non-upper caste
members. This study investigates the effect of the group- and income-based AA policies
on willingness to compete, fairness perceptions about the AA policies, and intergroup relations with both within- and between-group inequality. In line with previous literature, the
willingness to compete in a Tullock contest increases for beneficiaries and does not decrease
for non-beneficiaries with within-group homogeneity; however, within-group heterogeneity
discourages non-beneficiaries. Regarding fairness, we find that participants find GB-AA
the least fair, especially with heterogeneity, even though everyone chooses the institution
according to their benefit as a social planner. We further find that the rich, creamy layer
among the beneficiaries of affirmative action is hated the most when points are deducted
from them, especially when they win the contest.

In many hiring processes, job candidates are evaluated by intermediaries, such as human-resources
personnel and/or external recruiters. These intermediaries evaluate the candidates based on CVs and
other information, and preselect the candidates which they expect to be hired by the hiring manager.
As a result, intermediaries might preselect a biased pool of candidates if they are influenced by their
expectations about the hiring manager’s preferences, potentially including (unwarranted) discriminatory biases. We designed two incentivized experiments, where participants act as intermediaries and
predict how a hiring manager will evaluate candidates based on both job-relevant measures (e.g., aptitude and personality tests) and seemingly irrelevant factors such as gender. Importantly, they also
observe information about the hiring manager including their gender, age and math skills, allowing
us to test whether intermediaries differentially evaluate candidates depending on who they are hiring
for. We consistently find that intermediaries expect managers to prefer candidates of the same gender
as the manager (expected same-gender favoritism). Furthermore, by tracing the intermediaries’ visual
attention, we find that intermediaries who expect more same-gender favoritism, also look longer at the
candidates’ gender information. Accordingly, given the overrepresentation of men in managerial roles,
these results on expected same-gender favoritism highlight a novel mechanism in which discrimination
takes place in the labor market

Sustaining shared resources and coordinating collectively for sustainable behavior are essential to human economic activities and environmental conservation. Ecolabels are widely used to signal sustainable practices and to influence individual consumer behavior, yet their role as a coordination device in common-pool resource problems remains largely unexplored. We test the impact of ecolabels on behavior in a dynamic common-pool resource dilemma with real economic and environmental incentives. In our lab experiment, groups of participants trade off short-term individual profits from resource extraction against long-term collective gains and resource preservation, a tension that induces high strategic uncertainty. We find that ecolabel significantly increase sustainable behavior, extending resource survival by 20-23% while also raising participants’ earnings. Results show that ecolabels set standards that facilitate early-on coordination on sustainable behavior, which is then maintained through conditional cooperation. Importantly, these effects arise even when ecolabels are purely symbolic, providing no direct monetary benefit, and they persist when participants interact with computerized others. Our findings uncover underexplored mechanisms of ecolabels that can affect individual and collective decision making, and suggest that, beyond consumer nudges, ecolabels can serve as policy instruments for promoting sustainable behavior and establishing shared sustainable standards.

We investigate the trade-off between the opportunity costs of decisions and their quality
in a simple model. In a lab experiment, we introduce exogenous variation in the
opportunity costs of time. Contrary to claims in the previous literature, we show that
using more time when making small-stake decisions does not indicate irrational
behavior, and neither does a positive correlation between decision time and the
probability of making mistakes. Such behavior is compatible with rational decisionmaking and our causal experimental evidence and, hence, does not imply that people
behave fundamentally irrational when making observable decision errors under risk.

In this study, we investigated how spatial, temporal, and effort dimensions collectively influence reward discounting across different age groups. Using a 3D simulated environment, participants aged 7 to 77 chose between a nearby tree with fewer apples and a distant tree with more apples, requiring more time and effort to reach. Our findings revealed that participants initially preferred the distant tree with more apples, but as the difference in rewards decreased, they became increasingly more likely to choose the closer, less effortful option. This shift suggests a gradual re-evaluation of effort versus reward as the perceived value difference diminishes. Contrary to our hypothesis, younger participants were less likely to discount effortful rewards compared to middle-aged and older adults. These results underscore the complexity of decision-making across different dimensions and age groups, highlighting the need for more ecologically valid research in understanding how humans make trade-offs in naturalistic scenarios.