Social Context and Decisions : Essays in experimental economics

Humans are social animals who evolved to live in societies. They are "encultured" actors as their preferences, perceptions and values are shaped by the social context to which they are exposed. Part of economic failures is due to suboptimal social contexts which determine individuals' decisions. These social contexts can be better designed by organizations and governments. The ultimate goal of this research is to emphasize that social context can be detrimental for individual decisions, providing empirically-based behavioral insights for policy makers who wish to implement regulatory policies on corruption, gender gap and injustice. Behavioral and Experimental Economics provides a clean tool to keep the internal validity necessary to disentangle complex behavioral aspects that cannot be easily observed in the field, such as those related to the influence of social environment. This Doctoral Thesis is a collection of three laboratory experimental essays about the interplay between suboptimal social contexts and decisions. The first Chapter investigates the role of group identity in unethical decisions motivated by unfairness. The second Chapter provides evidence of gender stereotype in perceptions of others'risk attitudes. The third Chapter shows that small contextual changes can promote the diffusion of corruption while others inhibit it.