Open research questions in Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies
436 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 4,778 Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.
What the literature leaves open
Future research on the commonalities and distinctions between trust, reliance and confidence - Providing a stepping-off point for future research on the relationship between trust, reliance and confidence
The lack of empirical evidence for the distinction between trust and mere reliance. The lack of understanding of how people perceive trust and mere reliance in different contexts. The need for a study that can provide insights into the relationship between trust, reliance, and confidence.
Further analysis of the impact of demographic change on liberal democracies, - Investigation of the effectiveness of sovereign covenant bonds in practice
The puzzle of why rational governments adopt repressive policies that erode their own liberal foundations. The lack of a formal model of democratic backsliding. The need for a framework to analyze the trade-off between short-term political benefits and long-term institutional costs.
However, the manipulation did not succeed; therefore, it remains unclear whether experiencing disadvantageous inequity led participants to avoid advantageous unfairness more or less.
How social context modulates the roles of fairness, reciprocity, and empathy on advantageous inequity aversion · 2026 · DOIHowever, studies on the absolute prediction of one’s own learning state, which is necessary for effective learning, are lacking.
This phenomenon of “principled trustfulness” has been documented for trust implicating the moral character of another person but not explored for cases involving their competence.
Behavioral Trust in Competence Versus Morality: Experimental Evidence of Differences and Similarities · 2025 · DOIPrior work shows such incentives increase group performance despite freeriding concerns, yet little is known about the effort response of individuals.
Thus, future research should investigate EXPERTS, AMATEURS, AND REFRIGERATORS 317 ability of decisional biases to the realistic and information-rich settings of the expert’s natural decision domain. This criticism represents both a limitation of this study and a direction for future research.
Experts, amateurs, and refrigerators: Comparing expert and amateur negotiators in a novel task · 1986 · DOIAs Chinese and Koreans are characterized by individualism collectivists equality allocation appropriate future and Americans that suggest the to make use of they perceive as in that issue should be further explored rule regardless of the group membership of the recipient, whereas their American the consequences of the equity and 1980, 1983), these two findings to achieve an interactional to a given situation.
Because of the small number of male subjects who adjusted their behavior over time or in response to their partner's involvement change, the current results are inconclusive about when males compensate and reciprocate.
The effects of communicator characteristics on patterns of reciprocity and compensation · 1987 · DOIThe experiment had a limited number of participants. One participant decided to leave the experiment in one session. Technical issues occurred in one session, resulting in an error.
Future research should investigate the robustness of the findings in different economic environments. The study's results can be extended to other domains, such as finance and marketing.
Future research could examine the implications of moral accounting for decision-making in other contexts. It could investigate the mechanisms underlying moral spillovers and the role of responsibility in shaping prosocial behavior.
The paper identifies a gap in understanding how moral behavior spills over across sequential decisions. It notes that prior work has not fully examined the concept of moral accounting and its implications for moral spillovers.
Fairness is desirable yet challenging to achieve in multi-agent systems. Heterogeneous types among agents can lead to unequal distributions of wealth.
We have proposed a framework for designing fair contracts in SSD games with heterogeneous agents and verified the results empirically. Crucially, we have shown that simple linear fairness-aware contracts are able to induce a cooperative behavior between agents, ensuring the fairness of the entire system, without sacrificing welfare in comparison to the baselines. Limitations. Our experiments are limited to a simple domain, which may not capture the complexi- ties of real-world settings. Additionally, while linear contracts offer simplicity and interpretability, it is not necessarily the case for learned contract policies, which remain difficult to analyze. Future Work. A natural extension of this work involves exploring more expressive contract forms, where payments can be conditioned on richer outcome spaces. While potentially harder to interpret, such contracts may offer greater flexibility and effectiveness in steering the system toward desired outcomes. Another promising direction is to consider deceiving agents who might try to game the contracts offered by the principal, and how such behavior could be counteracted. Finally, it would be interesting to explore how adaptive contracts could be leveraged when the principal’s goal is to allocate wealth according to an arbitrary target distribution rather than ensuring equity.
The study identifies a gap in the literature on how meritocracy beliefs influence evaluations of pay dispersion. The study highlights the need for further research on the psychological factors that influence evaluations of pay dispersion.
They Work Hard for Their Money…or Do They? The Role of Meritocracy Beliefs on Evaluations of Pay Dispersion · 2026 · DOIThere are several potential weaknesses of the current research. For one, as meritoc- racy beliefs were measured rather than manipulated, their potential causal effects can be called into question. Importantly, meritocracy beliefs were measured before par- ticipants viewed and evaluated any information about pay dispersion. Furthermore, we ensured that the effects of meritocracy beliefs were not simply driven by political conservatism, which predicts attitudes towards income inequality (e.g., Norton & Ariely, 2011), by controlling for it in our analyses. In future research, it would be interesting to manipulate meritocracy beliefs to test their causal effects (e.g., Darnon et al., 2018a; 2018b). Similarly, further experiments are needed in which level of equity is independently manipulated to test its causal effects on evaluations of dis- tributive unfairness (Spencer et al., 2005). There are a number of potential issues with our manipulation of pay dispersion. To manipulate levels of pay dispersion, we both increased top pay and decreased bottom pay. Therefore, it is not possible to disentangle whether the effects of our manipulation are due to spread, high top level pay, or low bottom level pay. Future research is needed to disentangle these factors. Furthermore, given our desire to maximize the ecological validity of our manipulation, incremental changes in pay were not symmetrical. In reality, high pay dispersion is mostly caused by exorbitant high pay. Finally, our manipulated levels of pay dispersion all involved some degree of inequality. Previous research suggests that people may prefer low levels of pay dispersion, compared with absolute equality (Kiatpongsan, & Norton, 2014; Kuhn, 2011). Thus, participants may evaluate low levels of pay dispersion more positively than absolute pay equality. Future research could manipulate levels of pay dispersion from none to high with multiple increments to test if the effects of level of pay disper- sion on evaluations of fairness and equity may be curvilinear. Social Justice Research (2026) 39:1–411 3 33 By virtue of collecting data via MTurk, we had large samples and thus both studies were generally well-powered, allowing us to be more confident in the estimates of our effects (Cocks & Togerson, 2013). Our samples were relatively diverse in terms of age, income, ethnicity, and employment, therefore increasing the potential generaliz- ability of our findings to other Americans.3 However, it is unknown whether our find- ings might generalize outside of the United States. Generalizability is more likely for countries that share similar characteristics to the United States in terms of pay disper- sion, as well as meritocracy beliefs, such as other developed, Western nations (Duru- Bellat & Tenret, 2012). However, descriptive meritocracy beliefs may not operate as a system justification belief in contexts where there are weaker assumptions that meritocracy is the status quo (Cichocka & Jost, 2014), such as in some former com- munist, Eastern European countries (Roex et al., 2019). Furthermore, although equity is the dominant distributive justice principle in Western workplaces (Hook & Cook, 1979), this preference appears to be culture-based (Bolino & Turnley, 2008; Conlon et al., 2004; Murphy-Berman & Berman, 2002). Future research is needed to test for cross-cultural differences. In this research, we were interested in public opinions of pay dispersion; however, some might be more interested in how employees evaluate pay dispersion within their own organization. It is possible that the effects of the current research may gen- eralize to employees, as previous research on performance suggests the importance of equity in employees’ reactions to pay dispersion within their organization (Shaw & Gupta, 2007). For instance, employees are more satisfied with their pay to the degree to which they see it as performance based and as not too unequal (Petrescu & Simmons, 2008). Alternatively, the effects of meritocracy beliefs might be weaker, as additional factors would likely come into play for workers, such as their personal level of performance and pay (Trevor & Wazeter, 2006). Future research can inves- tigate these possibilities.
They Work Hard for Their Money…or Do They? The Role of Meritocracy Beliefs on Evaluations of Pay Dispersion · 2026 · DOIThe standard rotten kid theorem relies on strong assumptions about rationality, foresight, and the internalization of family externalities. These assumptions may fail when heirs are present-biased, when they place excessive weight on current consumption, or when their actions impose costs on other household members.
Acting in an intellectually generous way toward a large and diverse group of people can be more difficult than acting in an intellectually generous way towards a small number of people. Intellectual generosity requires knowing the intellectual wants and needs of the intended recipients and how to share intellectual goods with them effectively.
On the Complexity and Significance of Intellectual Generosity: Lessons from Sharing with Large Groups · 2026 · DOIThe paper identifies a gap in the literature on intellectual generosity. Intellectual generosity remains relatively under-explored in virtue epistemology.
On the Complexity and Significance of Intellectual Generosity: Lessons from Sharing with Large Groups · 2026 · DOIThe study used a survey design, which may be subject to biases and limitations. The sample was limited to 6,601 participants, which may not be representative of the broader population. The study did not control for all potential confounding variables.
Consistent kindness: Money allocation and kind act decisions are regulated by a ‘welfare trade-off ratio’ · 2026 · DOIFuture research could aim to further validate the Kindness Questionnaire and establish its usefulness in a variety of contexts. Future research could also explore the implications of the study's findings for understanding prosocial behavior and developing interventions aimed at increasing kindness.
Consistent kindness: Money allocation and kind act decisions are regulated by a ‘welfare trade-off ratio’ · 2026 · DOIThe study excluded 15 participants due to missing SVO data, invalid trials, or random responses throughout the experiment. The study had a limited sample size of 92 adults. The study did not investigate the neural mechanisms underlying prosocial model-based decision-making.
Deciding for others diminishes model-based decision-making but depends on individual prosociality · 2026 · DOI
Most-cited papers in Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies
- A Theory of Fairness, Competition, and Cooperation · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · 1999 · 8,294 citations
- Impure Altruism and Donations to Public Goods: A Theory of Warm-Glow Giving · The Economic Journal · 1990 · 4,203 citations
- Multitask Principal–Agent Analyses: Incentive Contracts, Asset Ownership, and Job Design · The Journal of Law Economics and Organization · 1991 · 4,002 citations
- Altruistic punishment in humans · Nature · 2002 · 3,944 citations
- ERC: A Theory of Equity, Reciprocity, and Competition · American Economic Review · 2000 · 3,795 citations
- Regression Discontinuity Designs in Economics · Journal of Economic Literature · 2010 · 3,573 citations
- Anomalies: The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion, and Status Quo Bias · The Journal of Economic Perspectives · 1991 · 3,546 citations
- Towards an understanding of inequity. · Journal of Abnormal & Social Psychology · 1963 · 3,508 citations
- An experimental analysis of ultimatum bargaining · Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization · 1982 · 3,326 citations
- Cooperation and Punishment in Public Goods Experiments · American Economic Review · 2000 · 3,221 citations
Most recent work
- The Social Origins of Effort: How Incentives Reduce Socioeconomic Disparities among Children · American Sociological Review · 2026
- De Gustibus and Disputes about Reference Dependence · The Review of Economic Studies · 2026
- Altruistic punishment in action: movement vigour in neuroeconomic choice · Royal Society Open Science · 2026
- Understanding contest skill to reduce the welfare costs of aggression · Biology Letters · 2026
- Deciding for others diminishes model-based decision-making but depends on individual prosociality · npj Science of Learning · 2026
- Optimal Taxation and Other-Regarding Preferences · Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics · 2026
- Managerial Intervention, Employee Motivation, and Collaboration · Management Science · 2026
- Intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivators on creative collaboration: The effect of sharing rewards · Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization · 2026
- Alliance formation in team contests with Blotto budgets · Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization · 2026
- Generative AI, perceived job displacement, and policy preferences: Experimental evidence from China · Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization · 2026
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