Tipping is a unique phenomenon. There are various economic theories on the rationale behind tipping behaviour; two mainstream views are the narrow neoclassical view and the open-ended behavioural view. However, neither of these views provides complete explanations and insights into tipping behaviour. Tipping is a very important economic activity that accounts for a substantial part of our expenditures. Therefore the motives behind tipping should be a critical concern to us and there is a need to conduct in-depth analysis on tipping as an economic activity. <p> This study sets out to improve our understanding of tipping behaviour. In order to achieve this, possible socio-economic motives behind tipping are identified. There is an attempt to verify these motives with empirical evidence obtained in this study. A survey on restaurant tipping was designed and implemented, prompting respondents for their tip percentages as if they were dining in a restaurant. Using information so obtained, the socio-economic factors that influence individuals tipping behaviour was determined by econometric analysis.<p>Based on the results of this study, individuals may be tipping to conform to social norms, to be altruistic and to encourage better future service. Service quality, the tippers ethnic background and the tippers area of study seem to be the major determinants of tip percentages. Poor service is the main factor causing individuals to decide not to tip in a restaurant. An interesting finding is that individuals fail to accurately convert their expressed tip percentages to dollar amounts. This implies that individuals may be cognitively constrained. <p> Another noteworthy outcome is that 26% of all respondents choose to tip even when service is poor and when they are dining in a restaurant they will never visit again. This leads to the concept of a core and marginal tip. Without future service considerations, the mean tip when service is poor can be viewed as the core tip that is likely shaped by social norms and altruism. The marginal tip can be viewed as the increment in tips when service improves. Results of this study lead to the conclusion that tipping is a multi-faceted phenomenon. It is influenced by a number of different motives; therefore it is better explained by a combination of neoclassical and behavioural theories.

Tipping is a unique phenomenon. There are various economic theories on the rationale behind tipping behaviour; two mainstream views are the narrow neoclassical view and the open-ended behavioural view. However, neither of these views provides complete explanations and insights into tipping behaviour. Tipping is a very important economic activity that accounts for a substantial part of our expenditures. Therefore the motives behind tipping should be a critical concern to us and there is a need to conduct in-depth analysis on tipping as an economic activity. <p> This study sets out to improve our understanding of tipping behaviour. In order to achieve this, possible socio-economic motives behind tipping are identified. There is an attempt to verify these motives with empirical evidence obtained in this study. A survey on restaurant tipping was designed and implemented, prompting respondents for their tip percentages as if they were dining in a restaurant. Using information so obtained, the socio-economic factors that influence individuals tipping behaviour was determined by econometric analysis.<p>Based on the results of this study, individuals may be tipping to conform to social norms, to be altruistic and to encourage better future service. Service quality, the tippers ethnic background and the tippers area of study seem to be the major determinants of tip percentages. Poor service is the main factor causing individuals to decide not to tip in a restaurant. An interesting finding is that individuals fail to accurately convert their expressed tip percentages to dollar amounts. This implies that individuals may be cognitively constrained. <p> Another noteworthy outcome is that 26% of all respondents choose to tip even when service is poor and when they are dining in a restaurant they will never visit again. This leads to the concept of a core and marginal tip. Without future service considerations, the mean tip when service is poor can be viewed as the core tip that is likely shaped by social norms and altruism. The marginal tip can be viewed as the increment in tips when service improves. Results of this study lead to the conclusion that tipping is a multi-faceted phenomenon. It is influenced by a number of different motives; therefore it is better explained by a combination of neoclassical and behavioural theories.

Research in judgement and decision-making has identified numerous ways in which human decisions are likely to be biased, deviating systematically from the behaviour one would expect if humans were fully rational 'Econs', maximizing their utility with perfect self-control. Suboptimal decision-making as a result of these biases imposes large costs on individuals and society. In this thesis I investigate experimentally how decision-making can be improved, focusing on the health domain, where errors ultimately become a matter of life and death. Chapter 1: Providing feedback has been shown to be an effective way to change behaviour across several domains, including energy use and the workplace. However, there is little evidence on the effect of providing feedback in high stakes environments, where people make risky decisions with potentially catastrophic losses. In the first chapter I conduct a field experiment that provides feedback and information in such a context - emergency healthcare. Understanding the drivers of patients' decision-making relating to their demand for healthcare services and how they can be directed to the most appropriate services at any given time is a challenge for health systems across many countries. This trial aimed to reduce avoidable Emergency Department (A&E) attendances by sending a personal feedback letter to people who recently attended an Emergency Department but whose health concerns could have been dealt with elsewhere. Patients were randomly allocated to either receive a follow-up letter with information on alternatives to A&E or no letter (usual care). Overall, I do not find a statistically significant difference between the re-attendance rates of patients who did and did not receive the letters. However, the effect of the intervention interacted significantly with patient age, especially in men. I develop a conceptual framework that explores possible explanations for these heterogeneous effects. Chapter 2: Policy interventions drawing on insights from behavioural sciences are increasingly popular and have been successfully applied across a number of different policy areas. However, little attention has been paid to the extent to which the effects of repeated behavioural interventions are sustained over time. In the second chapter I study this question through a natural field experiment in the English National Health Service (NHS). The intervention consists of changing the salience of waiting time on the clinicians' e-Referral Service (ERS) interface. Waiting longer can negatively affect patients' health gains from receiving treatment, so referring patients to services with shorter waiting times can be of benefit. I find, through a stepped wedge trial, that putting a simple alert against services with high waiting times leads to a 35 percent reduction in the share of referrals to these services. The effect of the intervention is sustained over time and does not vary with prior referral habits. A small, low-cost intervention increasing the salience of waiting time to clinicians has a powerful and sustained effect on the choices of their patients. Chapter 3: Behavioural attitudes toward risk and time, as well as behavioural biases such as present bias, are thought to be important drivers of unhealthy lifestyle choices. While the first two chapters of this thesis take behavioural biases as given, the third chapter makes a first attempt at exploring the possibility of training the mind to alter these attitudes and biases, in particular relating to health-related behaviours, using a randomized controlled experiment. The intervention we consider is a well-known psychological technique called "mindfulness", which is believed to improve self-control and reduce stress. We conduct an experiment with 139 participants, around half of whom receive a four-week mindfulness training, while the other half are asked to watch a four-week series of historical documentaries. We find strong evidence that mindfulness training reduces perceived stress, but only weak evidence of its impact on behavioural traits and health-related behaviours. We do not see that engagement with mindfulness training is correlated with behavioural characteristics such as impulsiveness and impatience. Our findings have significant implications for a new domain of research on training the mind to alter behavioural traits and biases that play important roles in lifestyle.

This thesis is a sociological history of the making of behavioural economics. Behavioural economics is a discipline in which economists draw on psychological knowledge and approaches to understand economic behaviour. The narrative begins with the lives and work of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in the newly established state of Israel. It then moves from the making of the so called Heuristics and Biases Programme in the 1970’s to the privately funded Behavioural Economics Program in the USA in the 1980’s. Using a blend of analysis of archival documents, published material, and interviews I seek to understand the formation of the discipline of behavioural economics by applying the notion of a psychology)of)error as an analytical tool. The small number of historians who have studied behavioural economics have all identified a concern with human error as a crucial element of its intellectual makeup. I take this observation further by arguing that both Kahneman and Tversky’s Heuristics and Biases Programme and behavioural economics are psychologies) of) error because the object to be explained in both fields was restricted to behavioural deviations from a normative core. In the case of Heuristics and Biases that normative core consisted of a blend of statistical and logical norms imported from traditional decision theory about what constituted rational decision making. In the case of behavioural economics the normative core was made up of assumptions about rational economic behaviour developed by neo-classical economists. Understanding behavioural economics as a psychology of error allows me to shed light on the complicated relationship between behavioural economics and neo-classical economics. Specifically it helps explain how behavioural economists sought to strike a careful balance between critiquing the descriptive claims of neo-classical economists and reinforcing their normative ambitions.

Nowadays BE deals with many other issues besides loss aversion and the preference for fairness mentioned above. There are many works which examine such phenomena like the endowment effect, or the framing effect, the inequality aversion and the judgment choice discrepancy, the money illusion, or the mental accounting. This thesis will examine two of these topics: the discrepancy between choice and judgment and the inequality aversion. It will also try to prove that besides material payoffs there exist nonmaterial payoffs, which influence people's choices through their judgments and can be crucial in some situations, leading sometimes even to reversals in preferences.

Human behaviour can be explained not only through experience and environments but also by incorporating evolutionary explanation. Consumer behaviour could not be understood accurately without infusing Darwinian evolutionary theory which has contributed in the knowledge of human nature. Evolutionary psychology revolves around the human's evolved mental and the impact on human's traits and behaviour where the influence of the environment to our genes would determine our individual behaviour and traits, resulting in variation among us. Foraging which is a part of behavioural ecology involves many sequences or repetitions of animals' activities and decision making which is useful to relate these patterns of activities to the decisions made in human consumption. The aim of this research is to investigate the similarities of human consumption and ecological behaviour by employing interpretative and comparative approach. It is hoped that by applying the evolutionary theory in explaining consumer choice, this study is able to contribute to the development of behavioural ecology in human consumption.

Behavioural economics builds on psychology rather than on sociology, and on cognitive science rather than the science of culture. The same is true for new behavioural scholarship in the legal discipline, whether this is referred to as 'behavioural law and economics' or 'law and the behavioural sciences'. The result of a one-sided definition of a more realist research agenda in legal scholarship is an impoverished understanding of the 'social'. In Thaler and Sunstein's famous concept of nudging, social conformity appears as a property of the individual, which can be instrumentalized by social nudges. More generally, the cognitive strand of behavioural economics lends itself to strategies of regulatory 'debiasing', which suggests that it is possible to get down to pure preferences that are free from any distortions. While this approach neglects the endogeneity, or social contingency, of individual preferences, the social strand of behavioural economics is explicitly concerned with the dynamics of social interaction, or the effects of social interdependence. However, both strands of behavioural economics are still higher on methodological individualism, naturalism or positivism and lower on institutionalism, culturalism or constructivism than a genuinely sociological approach. More specifically, their understanding of the 'social' does not sufficiently account for the social embeddedness of both rational and irrational economic action. What is more, behavioural economics also lacks the means to reflect on the link between science and politics, which includes the question of why different models of economic man are attractive at different points in time. The conceptual move from rational to behavioural economic man bears distinctive policy implications, which are in line with the transformation of welfare capitalism towards 'less state' and 'more market'. While the overall direction of this project gets blurred in Thaler and Sunstein's branding of 'libertarian paternalism', it is evident in the adaptation of consumer policies, which proceeds under the imperative of market-conformity. Accordingly, a strategy of nudging does not put into question the wider institutional context but offers a technical solution to what is defined as a problem of individual behavioural rigidities and cognitive biases in the market environment.

A travers cette thèse, nous étudions l'envie et explorons l'impact de cette dernière sur le bien-être et le comportement individuel. Cette thèse se compose de quatre chapitres. Dans un premier chapitre, nous définissons l'envie en nous référant à des travaux réalisés en philosophie et en psychologie. Nous concluons que l'envie est une émotion déclenchée par la prise de conscience d'un attribut désiré, possédé par autrui et qui se caractérise par une douloureuse tristesse incluant des sentiments d'hostilité. Ensuite nous élaborons un protocole expérimental dont l'objectif est d'étudier l'impact de l'envie sur le bien-être et sur le comportement individuel. Nous capturons l'envie à travers des méthodes d'évaluation subjective et nous examinons si l'envie incite les sujets à réduire la dotation de leur partenaire malgré le coût personnel induit par la réduction. Nous observons que l'envie est fortement présente mais n'explique pas pourquoi les sujets réduisent la dotation des autres. Les inégalités de dotations mesurées en termes relatifs modulent les décisions des sujets à réduire la dotation d'autrui. Dans le chapitre trois, nous nous intéressons à l'impact de l'effort sur l'envie. Pour cela nous élaborons deux traitements. Dans un traitement, les sujets reçoivent des dotations de manière aléatoire alors que dans l'autre traitement les dotations sont attribuées en fonction de la performance de chaque sujet lors d'une tache effectuée avant l'expérience. Nous trouvons que l'effort n'affecte pas la satisfaction des sujets mais partiellement leur comportement : les sujets ne sont pas plus nombreux a réduire les gains des autres mais ils en réduisent une plus grande partie. Enfin, nous nous intéressons à un type de sujets particulier dans lequel l'envie est susceptible d'être ressentie fortement : les sportifs. Nous concluons que la pratique d'activités sportives pousse les agents à ressentir de l'envie et les incite à entreprendre des actions de réduction. / Throughout this dissertation we aim at identifying envy and investigating its impacts on both individual well-being and behaviour. This dissertation consists of four chapters. The first chapter is devoted to the definition of envy by referring to both researches on philosophy and psychology. We convey that envy can be defined as an emotion triggered by the awareness of a desired attribute enjoyed by another person characterised by a painful sadness including feelings of hostility. In the second chapter, we implement an experiment so as to investigate the impact of envy on individual well-being and behaviour. We capture envy through referring to self-report methods and explore whether envy pushes subjects to reduce their opponent's endowment at a personal cost. We observe that envy is highly present but does not explain why subjects reduce others' income. Inequalities between subjects' endowments measured in relative terms modulate subjects' decisions to reduce others' income. In chapter three, we study how effort affects envy and whether the impact of envy on both individual well-being and behaviour is amplified or weakened by effort. To fulfil our purpose, we implement two different conditions. In one condition endowments are randomly attributed to subjects and in the other condition endowments are allocated according to each subject's performance in a task. We observe that effort does not affect subjects' satisfaction and partially their behaviour : subjects do not reduce more often their opponent's endowment but they cut a higher portion of their opponent's endowment when endowments are attributed according to individual effort. In the final chapter, we focus on a specific category of subjects in which envy is ought to be experienced intensively : subjects practicing sport activities. We observe that sport practice pushes subjects to experience envy and exerts them to engage in reduction decisions.

This thesis describes three different experiments investigating dishonesty. Chapter one investigates the use of default values and prompts in a tax filing system. Pre-populated fields simplify the process of filing taxes, thereby reducing the scope for errors. Such defaults may increase the scope for non-compliance if set incorrectly. The chapter describes an experiment investigating the effect of correct and incorrect defaults. The results show that setting defaults that underestimate taxpayers’ true liability produces a fall in compliance. Nudges designed to mitigate the adverse effect of pre-population are also described. Nudges using descriptive norms in a dynamic manner that react to taxpayer decisions raise compliance. The chapter concludes that the use of defaults is worthwhile only if the data is of sufficient quality. Chapter two describes a model for lying aversion containing cost elements in terms of the size of the lie told and in the positive deviation above a reference point reflecting the point at which someone becomes concerned about the credibility of the value being reported or about appearing boastful. An experiment based on a numeracy test where subjects have the ability to cheat by paying themselves for their performance is used to test the model. Two treatments are detailed using modal values from initial control sessions to set different reference points. The results show a greater propensity among subjects to report false values under the higher reference point consistent with the model. Chapter three details an experimental investigation into lying behaviour between two samples, one a sample of undergraduate student subjects the other of workers recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk. Results from a senderreceiver game based on a lottery draw show a higher propensity to report partially false values among student subjects, consistent with a higher reputational concern on behalf of the workers compared to students.

Neoclassical economic theorys assumption of a strictly utility of money maximizing economic actor has been unable to explain such economic phenomena as involuntary unemployment and above market clearing wages. Efficiency wage theory, in its various forms, has provided some explanation for these labour market features. Akerlofs (1982) Fair Wage-Effort Hypothesis or Partial Gift Exchange model of the labour market explains involuntary unemployment through the productivity enhancing effects of higher wages. In Akerlofs model this is done through a sort of unspoken gift exchange in which higher wages given to the workers are returned to the firm in the form of higher effort or productivity. <p>The Partial Gift Exchange model can also be modeled in a laboratory setting where its various predictions and assumptions can be tested. This has been done by a number of researchers over the last 15 years, who have generally found support for the validity of the theory using a one sided oral auction procedure. This thesis seeks to conduct a similar experiment, but in the form of a survey, the focus of which is the relationship between wages and effort. <p>A number of the results of previous experiments supporting the Fair Wage-Effort Hypothesis have also been generated in the survey, for example a positive relationship between wages and effort. New and interesting findings not previously examined in the lab or not present in previous experiment were also present in the survey: the negative effect of wage inequity; a positive coefficient for the gender dummy variable; and the negative effect of unemployment insurance. <p>The survey has produced some new and interesting results, transporting the survey back into the laboratory setting from which it was inspired would provide an interesting comparison.