The goal of this paper is to link attitude toward risk over personal consumption with attitude toward risk over social consumptions. Because many everyday choices involve risk, these attitudes enter virtually every realm of individual decision-making. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for deducing preferences over risky social choices (which have consequences both for the Decision Maker and for others) from risky personal choices (which have consequences only for the Decision Maker) and riskless social choices, and we offer an experimental test of the theory. The experiments generate a rich dataset that enables completely non-parametric revealed preference tests of the theory at the level of the individual subject. Many subjects behave as predicted by the theory but a substantial fraction do not.

This paper investigates fairness perceptions of extreme income inequality generated in winner-take-all competitions. Two large-scale experiments with more than 7,000 participants from the general population of the U.S. show that extreme earnings inequality is widely accepted, even when the winner only slightly outperforms the runner-up. The effect of the winning margin on inequality acceptance is modest compared to the effect of shifting the source of inequality from luck to winning by the smallest possible margin. The experimental choices are systematically associated with broader fairness attitudes and policy preferences, including support for higher taxation of top earners and redistributive economic policy.

In a randomized controlled trial, we test whether removal of a barrier to exercise can improve academic performance.We find strong support for this hypothesis: university students who were provided with a free gym card exercised more and had a significant improvement in academic performance.The treated students were both less likely to drop out of classes and to fail at the exam.We provide evidence showing that exercise caused a healthier lifestyle and increased perceived self-control, which ultimately improved academic performance.The study demonstrates that removing barriers to physical activity can be an important tool for improving educational achievements.