I investigate the relative importance of social-signaling versus self-signaling in driving giving. I derive specific qualitative predictions about how the response of an image-motivated dictator to a change in the probability that her choice will be implemented depends crucially on the information available to the relevant observer. A probabilistic dictator-game experiment tests the joint, relative, and independent effects of self-signaling and social-signaling. The results provide little evidence of self-signaling, but stronger evidence of social-signaling, particularly in a large subsample that excludes likely `selfish types'.

How robust are social preferences to variations in the environment in which a decision is made? By varying the elicitation method and default choice in the `moral wiggle-room' game of Dana, Weber, and Kuang (2007), I examine the robustness and nature of the pattern of information avoidance in which many dictators in experiments-- if initially uncertain-- avoid learning whether their choice will help or hurt another person and choose selfishly. When ignorance is not the default choice, participants choose it much less frequently. However, when dictators express their outcome choice using the strategy method, most are willing to overcome the default choice and reveal the payoff state ex post. I conclude that people will employ strategic ignorance to avoid a morally-fraught decision if they can do so passively, but having to actively choose ignorance betrays its usefulness and leads to behavior largely consistent with models of preferences over outcomes. Thus while opportunities to create and exploit moral wiggle-room limit fair-minded behavior, environmental or psychological variables may reinforce the motivation that leads people to choose fair outcomes.

How does overconfidence arise and how does it persist in the face of experience and feedback? In an experimental setting, we examine how individuals’ beliefs about their own performance on a quiz react to noisy, but unbiased feedback. In a control treatment, each participant expresses her beliefs about another participant’s performance, rather than her own. On average, they express accurate posteriors about others’ scores, but they overestimate their own score, believing themselves to have received ‘unlucky’ feedback. However, this driven by overconfident priors, as opposed to biased information processing. We also find that, while feedback improves estimates about the performance on which it is based, this learning does not translate into improved estimates of related performances. This suggests that people use performance feedback to update their beliefs about their ability differently than they do to update their beliefs about their performance, which may contribute to the persistence of overconfidence.

Beyond the classical reasons of efficiency, commitment, the distribution of information, or incentive provision, a person may also delegate decision rights so as to avoid blame for an unpopular or immoral decision. We show that by delegating to an intermediary, a dictator facing an allocation decision can effectively shift moral responsibility onto the delegee even when doing so necessarily eliminates the possibility of a fair outcome. Dictators who choose selfishly via an intermediary are punished less and earn greater profits than those who directly choose a selfish outcome, while the intermediary is punished more.

How does overconfidence arise and persist in the face of experience and feedback? We examine experimentally how individuals' beliefs about their absolute, as opposed to relative, performance on a quiz react to noisy, but unbiased, feedback. Participants believe themselves to have received `unlucky' feedback and they overestimate their own scores, but they exhibit no overconfidence in non-ego-relevant beliefs---in this case, about others' scores. Unlike previous studies of relative performance estimates, we find this to be driven by overconfident priors, as opposed to biased updating, which suggests that social comparisons contribute to biased information processing. While feedback improves performance estimates, this learning does not translate into improved estimates of subsequent performances. This suggests that people use performance feedback to update their beliefs about their ability differently than they do to update their beliefs about their performance, contributing to the persistence of overconfidence.

This dissertation concerns two key topics in behavioral economics: bounded rationality and hyperbolic time preferences. While these two topics do not have much in common, per se, the analyses presented here do contain unifying themes. Each chapter focuses on issues pertaining to public economics. The environments are often characterized by strategic interaction, in that each individual's choices affects the welfare of others. In such cases, economic efficiency is by no means guaranteed.

The first two chapters examine environments with multiple Nash equilibria, which limits predictions. I utilize Quantal Response Equilibrium, which relaxes the assumption of pure best-response in favor of noisy best response. This allows me to make comparative static predictions across group-size, information completeness, payoff-type, and state of the world; predictions that are problematic under pure best-response. I conduct laboratory experiments for the threshold game (chapter one) and the market entry game (chapter two). I find that much of the seemingly anomalous behavior observed in the data is easily explained using QRE. This suggests that quantal response is a useful alternative assumption to best-response in coordination problems, and, in particular, logit QRE is a valuable equilibrium model of coordination failure with simple economic intuition.

The third chapter advances a simple β-δ model of quasi-hyperbolic time preferences. In this chapter, the theoretical model is used to construct the key variables from our data. This data was collected in the field by my co-author, when she visited the islands of Bonaire and Curaçao in 2010. While much of the data is survey response or demographic related, the last part of each interview includes a paid experiment to elicit time preferences over various time horizons. We find that, controlling for key demographic factors, decreased patience (lower δ) and present bias (β<1)$ are associated with an lower willingness to adopt marine reserve restrictions, but they have no effect on attitudes about gear restrictions.

Land can be inefficiently allocated when attempts to assemble separately-owned pieces of land into large parcels are frustrated by holdout landowners. The existing land-assembly institution of eminent domain can be used neither to gauge efficiency nor to determine how to compensate displaced owners adequately. We take a mechanism-design approach to the assembly problem, formalizing it as a multilateral trade environment with perfectly complementary goods. We characterize the least-inefficient direct mechanism that is incentive compatible, self-financing, protects the property-rights of participants, and does not assume that participants have useful information about the subjective valuations of others. The second-best mechanism, which we call the Strong Pareto (SP) mechanism, utilizes a second-price auction among interested buyers, with a reserve sufficient to compensate fully all potential sellers, who are paid according to fixed and exhaustive shares of the winning buyer's offer. It may also internalize local externalities. While the SP mechanism only approves efficient sales, efficiency is not sufficient for sale---even with competitive bidding---because the auction reserve may exceed the aggregate seller valuation. The inefficiency of the second-best mechanism implies a Myserson-Satterthwaite (1981)-style impossibility theorem. We propose a criterion that encompasses concern for both efficiency and the rights of property owners to evaluate the relative performance of assembly mechanisms and the efficiency cost of strict adherence to individual rationality. In a simple example, we compare the expected outcome of the SP mechanism with two alternatives: a plurality mechanism based on SP, but with a lower reserve that is only high enough to fully compensate a plurality of owners and a stylized model of eminent domain.