Promises, Expectations & Causation

Giovanni Di Bartolomeo (), Martin Dufwenberg, Stefano Papa () and Francesco Passarelli ()

No 185, Working Papers in Public Economics from University of Rome La Sapienza, Department of Economics and Law

Abstract: Why do people keep their promises? Vanberg (2008) and Ederer & Stremitzer (2017) provide causal evidence in favor of, respectively, an intrinsic preference for keeping one’s word and Charness & Dufwenberg’s (2006) expectations-based account based on guilt aversion. The overall picture is incomplete though, as no study disentangles effects in a design that provides exogenous variation of both (the key features of) promises and beliefs. We present an experimental design that does so.

Keywords: Promises; Expectations; Guilt aversion; Moral commitment; Causation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 C91 D03 D64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21
Date: 2018-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-hpe and nep-upt
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Related works:
Journal Article: Promises, expectations & causation (2019)
Working Paper: Promises, Expectations & Causation (2018)
Working Paper: Promises, expectations & causation (2018)
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