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Pay what you want (PWYW) is an increasingly popular sales strategy in which consumers voluntarily decide how much to pay for a product or service. PWYW has often been described as an exercise in the “empathy economy,” where consumers' payment choices might be seen as empowered expressions of their tastes and preferences, and sellers have a stronger incentive for empathizing with them. Beyond their economic interest, PWYW experiences also deserve significant attention in the social sciences given that they challenge several key assumptions of rational choice and neoclassical economic theory, as well as conventional consumer behavior and pricing theories. This paper analyzes three plays performed at the Beckett Theater in Barcelona using PWYW with very profitable outcomes. Our analysis shows that socio‐psychological factors, such as payments attributed to others and satisfaction with the play, are the best predictors of customer payments.

The main objective of this work is to analyse the mechanisms through which the attacks occurring on March 11th 2004 in Madrid could have influenced citizen’s vote decisions and hence the results of the legislative elections held three days later in Spain. It is argued that the most probable hypothesis is that the attacks influenced the voting decisions of citizens through a combination of several mechanisms: (1) the indignation caused by the belief that the government had violated a series of moral norms when trying to manipulate information to obtain an electoral benefit and (2) the anger and indignation that arose from attributing the political responsibility for the attacks to the government due to its support of the USA during the Iraq War.

Debates on how the law affects citizens' behaviour have traditionally focused on two mechanisms: deterrence and perceptions of legitimacy. In recent years, some scholars have suggested that the law may also affect compliance through expressive mechanisms that reveal information about the world (for example, by eliciting the risks associated with a particular behaviour). Dharmapala and McAdams have called this the informative effect of law. However, to date very little empirical evidence of the existence of such an effect has emerged. In this article, we present the results of an experiment that tests for three different hypotheses as to how this effect may be produced. Our findings show that legislators' sincerity or their access to expert knowledge is not sufficient to produce information effects. Instead, we suggest an ‘asymmetry’ hypothesis: the fact that a law is passed or rejected has an asymmetrical information effect on subjects' risk perceptions.

Prosocial motivations and reciprocity are becoming increasingly important in social-science research. While laboratory experiments have challenged the assumption of universal selfishness, the external validity of these results has not been sufficiently tested in natural settings. In this article we examine the role of prosocial motivations and reciprocity in a Pay What You Want (PWYW) sales strategy, in which consumers voluntarily decide how much to pay for a product or service. This article empirically analyses the only PWYW example in Spain to date: the El trato (‘The deal’) campaign launched by the travel company Atrápalo, which offered different holiday packages under PWYW conditions in July 2009. Our analysis shows that, although the majority of the customers did not behave in a purely self-interested manner, they nonetheless did so in a much higher proportion than observed in similar studies. We present different hypotheses about the mechanisms that may explain these findings. Specifically, we highlight the role of two plausible explanations: the framing of the campaign and the attribution of ‘hidden’ preferences to Atrápalo by its customers, which undermined the interpretation of El trato as a trust game.

This paper explores institutional design strategies that promote compliance by regulated agents. Without a doubt, this is one of the central topics in contemporary political theory. Many illustrious traditions in political theory have held that institutions should be designed in such a way that they are capable of ensuring compliance of a nation of devils. This paper argues that such a viewpoint is erroneous and that effective regulatory institutions must assume virtue but must also be prepared for non-compliance; a view shared by some of the most renowned contemporary authors in the field of institutional design. In what follows, the contributions of scholars such as P. Pettit, I Ayres, J. Braithwaite, V. Braithwaite, T. Makkai, N. Gunningham, or P. Grabosky, among others, are reviewed. The possible problems and limitations that may arise with these proposals are then discussed and future lines of work suggested. Keywords: Institutional Design; Compliance; Deviant-Centred and Complier-Centred Strategies; Enforcement and Strengths-Based Pyramids. Resumen: Explorando mecanismos de diseño institucional que promuevan el cumplimiento En el presente trabajo se exploran estrategias de diseño institucional que promuevan el cumplimiento por parte de los agentes regulados. Éste es sin duda uno de los temas centrales en las ciencias sociales contemporáneas. Desde algunas ilustres tradiciones de teoría política se ha sostenido que las instituciones deben diseñarse de modo tal que sean capaces de asegurar el cumplimiento de un pueblo de demonios. En el presente trabajo se sostiene que dicho punto de vista es erróneo y que las instituciones reguladoras efectivas deben asumir la virtud pero estar preparadas para el incumplimiento. Éste es el punto de vista de algunos de los autores contemporáneos más notables en el terreno del diseño institucional. En lo que sigue, entre otras, se revisan las aportaciones de escolares como P. Pettit, I Ayres, J. Braithwaite, V. Braithwaite, T. Makkai, N. Gunningham o P. Grabosky entre otros. Posteriormente, se discuten algunos posibles problemas y limitaciones de este tipo de propuestas y se señalan algunas líneas para el desarrollo futuro de las mismas. Palabras clave: Diseño Institucional; Cumplimiento; Estrategias Centradas en el Cumplimiento; Estrategias Centradas en la Desviación; Pirámides de Aplicación y Pirámides Basadas en Fortalezas.

Different models of social influence have explored the dynamics of social contagion, imitation, and diffusion of different types of traits, opinions, and conducts. However, few behavioral data indicating social influence dynamics have been obtained from direct observation in `natural' social contexts. The present research provides that kind of evidence in the case of the public expression of political preferences in the city of Barcelona, where thousands of citizens supporting the secession of Catalonia from Spain have placed a Catalan flag in their balconies. We present two different studies. 1) In July 2013 we registered the number of flags in 26% of the the city. We find that there is a large dispersion in the density of flags in districts with similar density of pro-independence voters. However, we find that the density of flags tends to be fostered in those electoral district where there is a clear majority of pro-independence vote, while it is inhibited in the opposite cases. 2) During 17 days around Catalonia's 2013 National Holiday we observed the position at balcony resolution of the flags displayed in the facades of 82 blocks. We compare the clustering of flags on the facades observed each day to equivalent random distributions and find that successive hangings of flags are not independent events but that a local influence mechanism is favoring their clustering. We also find that except for the National Holiday day the density of flags tends to be fostered in those facades where there is a clear majority of pro-independence vote., 27 pages, 13 figures, 2 tables