We provide experimental evidence that subjects blame others on the basis of events they are not responsible for. In our experiment an agent chooses between a lottery and a safe asset; payment from the chosen option goes to a principal, who then decides how much to allocate between the agent and a third party. We observe widespread blame: regardless of their choice, agents are blamed by principals for the outcome of the lottery, an event they are not responsible for. We provide an explanation of this apparently irrational behavior with a delegated-expertise principal-agent model, the subjects’ salient perturbation of the environment.

We study how intelligence and personality affect the outcomes of groups, focusing on repeated interactions that provide the opportunity for profitable cooperation. Our experimental method creates two groups of subjects who have different levels of certain traits, such as higher or lower levels of Intelligence, Conscientiousness, and Agreeableness, but who are very similar otherwise. Intelligence has a large and positive long-run effect on cooperative behavior. The effect is strong when at the equilibrium of the repeated game there is a trade-off between short-run gains and long-run losses. Conscientiousness and Agreeableness have a natural, significant but transitory effect on cooperation rates.

We extend a standard model of parental investment and intergenerational mobility to include a fully specified genetic analysis of skill transmission. The model’s predictions differ substantially from the standard model’s. The coefficient of intergenerational income elasticity (IGE) may be larger than that in the standard model and depends on the distribution of the genotype. The distribution of genetic endowments may be stratified according to income. The model is tested on data, including genetic information, of twins and their parents, estimating how IGE is affected by genetic factors and how environment and genes interact. The effect of intelligence is substantially stronger than that of other traits.