Yuval Feldman
Biographic Data
| ID | 1493589 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Yuval Feldman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Yuval |
| FAMILY NAME | Feldman |
| SIGNATURE | FELDMAN Y |
| AFFILIATIONS | Bar-Ilan University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8416-865X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 66 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Sticky influence: How regulatory interventions affect prosocial behavior and their persistence in economic games
This study investigates how behavioral interventions affect prosocial decision-making in dictator and trust games, examining immediate and persistent effects. We conducted a two-round experiment with five treatments (defaults, sanctions, social norms, anchoring, moral persuasion) vs control, separated by an unrelated task to measure persistence. We explored how self-efficacy and gender moderate treatment effectiveness. Sanctions were initially mo…
Beyond Universal Cooperation: Domain‐Specific Mechanisms of Citizen Compliance Across Taxation, Health, and Environmental Regulation
This study challenges the assumption that cooperation mechanisms are uniform across policy domains by examining how trust and social norms influence personal commitment to cooperate (PCC) in taxation, public health, and environmental protection. Using data from 15 countries, we identify systematic differences that question universal regulatory designs. A key finding is a domain‐specific “substitution effect”: high institutional trust correlates w…
Can the Public be Trusted?: On the Promise and Perils of Voluntary Compliance
When do citizens voluntarily comply with regulations rather than act out of fear of sanctions? Can the Public be Trusted? challenges prevailing regulatory paradigms by examining when democratic states can rely on voluntary compliance. Drawing on behavioral science, law, and public policy research, Yuval Feldman explores why voluntary compliance, despite often yielding superior and more sustainable outcomes, remains underutilized by policymakers. …
Competing Under Oath: Can Honesty Pledges Reduce Cheating in Competitive Environments
People frequently compete with one another for awards, benefits, contracts, positions, or roles. One of the regulatory challenges in these contexts lies in preventing people from making dishonest claims to win such competitions. Honesty pledges, asking people to commit to ethical behavior ex ante, have been found to reduce cheating under non‐competitive settings (when rewards were given based on individual reports only). However, as people behave…
Polarization and Voluntary Compliance: The Impact of Ideological Extremity on the Effectiveness of Self‐Regulation
New governance models increasingly employ self‐regulation tools like pledges and nudges to achieve regulatory compliance. These approaches premise that voluntary compliance emerges from intrinsic motivation to cooperate rather than coercive measures. Central to their success is trust—both in government institutions and among citizens. However, rising societal polarization raises critical questions about the continued effectiveness of self‐regulat…
The obligation to obey the law: Exploring National Differences
People vary in the extent to which they generally feel obligated to obey the law. The Obligation to Obey the Law (OOL) plays a major role in how people respond to legal rules and whether they comply or violate such rules. Most existing research on OOL has been non-comparative. The present paper explores national differences in OOL by analyzing data from a survey conducted among a convenience sample ( n = 716) of law students in the Netherlands, t…
Effectiveness of Ex-Ante Honesty Oaths in Reducing Dishonesty Depends on Content
Dishonest behaviors such as tax evasion impose significant societal costs. Ex-ante honesty oaths—commitments to honesty before action—have been proposed as interventions to counteract dishonest behavior, but the heterogeneity in findings across operationalizations calls their effectiveness into question. We tested 21 honesty oaths (including a baseline oath)—proposed, evaluated, and selected by 44 expert researchers—and a no-oath condition in a m…
How pledges reduce dishonesty: The role of involvement and identification
Effectiveness of ex ante honesty oaths in reducing dishonesty depends on content
Affidavit aversion: Public preferences for trust‐based policy instruments
Regulators who aim to reduce administrative burdens often promote trust‐based policy instruments, such as legal affidavits or honesty pledges, as substitutes to traditional bureaucratic procedures. However, little is known on how the general public view such instruments, and whether people would actually comply with them, and under what circumstances. Using a series of experimental vignettes, we examine public preferences toward these instruments…
Cross-Theoretical Compliance: An Integrative Compliance Analysis of Covid-19 Mitigation Responses in Israel
To understand the question why people obey or break rules, different approaches have focused on different theories and subsets of variables. The present research develops a cross-theoretical approach that integrates these perspectives. We apply this in a survey of compliance with COVID-19 pandemic mitigation rules in Israel. The data reveal that compliance in this setting was shaped by a combination of variables originating from legitimacy, capac…
Varieties of regulatory regimes and their effect on citizens’ trust in firms
The regulation of market activity has been largely dominated by governmental command-and-control regulatory design (C&C), which was seen as the safest way to protect the public from potential harm by firms. In recent years, in an effort to move to more relaxed and less burdensome regulation, alternative regulatory tools have been developed, tools that rely on firms or other private actors in the various stages of regulation (self, or smart, regul…
Majority Nationalism Laws and the Equal Citizenship of Minorities: Experimental, Panel, and Cross-Sectional Evidence from Israel
Western societies are increasingly enacting majority nationalism laws to strengthen majority culture. We propose that these laws may alter attitudes about minorities’ equal citizenship with varied impact on majorities and minorities. To explore this issue, we examine the impact of Israel’s recently enacted Nation Law on the Jewish majority and the Arab minority. Experimental evidence from before the law’s enactment reveals that both minority and …
Does personalization of officeholders undermine the legitimacy of the office? On perceptions of objectivity in legal decisionmaking
Public legitimation of legal decisionmaking can be promoted through various strategies. We examine strategies of legitimation that are premised on personalizing the public image of legal agents. A personalized public administration emphasizes individual decisionmakers and seeks legitimacy through familiarity with the character, identity, and virtues of individual agents, whereas a non‐personalized public administration projects an ethos of techno…
Preference Change and Behavioral Ethics: Can States Create Ethical People
Law and economics scholarship suggests that, in appropriate cases, the law can improve people’s behavior by changing their preferences. For example, the law can curb discriminatory hiring practices by providing employers with information that might change their discriminatory preference. Supposedly, if employers no longer prefer one class of employees to another, they will simply stop discriminating, with no need for further legal intervention. T…
Honesty pledges for the behaviorally-based regulation of dishonesty
A common regulatory dilemma is determining how much trust authorities can place in people's self-reports, especially in contexts with an incentive to cheat. In such contexts, regulators are typically risk averse and do not readily confer trust, resulting in excessive requirements when applying for permits, licenses, etc. Studies in behavioral ethics have suggested that asking people to ex-ante pledge to behave ethically can reduce their level of …
The slippery slope of rights-restricting temporary measures: An Experimental Analysis
Times of emergency often serve as triggers for the creation of new policy. Such policies may involve restriction of human rights, and various mechanisms can be used to mitigate the severity of such restrictions. One such mechanism is the temporary measure. A series of three experiments examined the potential of temporary measures for increasing the likelihood of approval of rights-restricting policy and the role of time – both prospectively and r…
The Law of Good People: Challenging States' Ability to Regulate Human Behavior
Currently, the dominant enforcement paradigm is based on the idea that states deal with 'bad people' - or those pursuing their own self-interests - with laws that exact a price for misbehavior through sanctions and punishment. At the same time, by contrast, behavioral ethics posits that 'good people' are guided by cognitive processes and biases that enable them to bend the laws within the confines of their conscience. In this illuminating book, Y…
The Provocative Effect of Law: Majority Nationalism and Minority Discrimination
Western societies have experienced ethnic and religious diversification in recent decades. These demographic changes have been met by efforts to defend the local dominant culture using majority nationalism laws, intended to protect the cultural heritage of the majority. We empirically examine majority nationalism laws’ expressive effects on patterns of minority discrimination using the Israeli draft Nation Law (NL) as a case study. Drawing on two…
Experimental analysis of the effect of standards on compliance and performance
Legal directives – whether laws, regulations, or contractual provisions – can be written along a spectrum of specificity, about which behavioral and legal scholarship present conflicting views. We hypothesized that the combination of specificity and monitoring promotes compliance but harms performance and trust, whereas the combination of specificity and good faith enhances both the informative goal‐setting aspects of specificity and people's sen…
Rule orientation and behavior: Development and validation of a scale measuring individual acceptance of rule violation
There is individual variation in the extent to which individuals believe it is acceptable to violate legal rules. However, we lack a specific measure that assesses this key internal element of legal decision-making and offending. This article describes the development, validation, and testing of the Rule Orientation scale. At its core, the construct captures the extent to which one thinks about rules in a rigid, rule-oriented manner or in a manne…
The Human Mind and Human Rights: A Call for an Integrative Study of the Mechanisms Generating Employment Discrimination across Different Social Categories
The paper highlights how our knowledge about the manner the human mind works and people behave in social interactions may contribute to our understanding of employment discrimination and provide effective ways to address it. It calls for a rigorous empirical study of the mechanisms generating different forms of discrimination against disadvantaged groups and the implications that follow for law and policy. The paper’s focus is theoretical, critic…
Commonsense Morality and the Ethics of Killing in War: An Experimental Survey of the Israeli Population
The morality of killing in war, which has been the subject of debate among philosophers and legal scholars, focuses on two main approaches: the “traditional” and the “revisionist.” The traditional approach argues for symmetry: soldiers of both sides are liable to be killed, whether or not the war they fight is just; civilians are immune from being harmed whether or not they are responsible for the evil against which the just side fights. Recently…
Behavioral Equity
The paper uses the findings of psychology, behavioral economics, and behavioral ethics to revisit three main related assumptions of the rational-choice approach to equity, by developing three main points: first, not only bad people try to circumvent the law; second, behavior depends on the relationship between specificity, trust, and the type of motivation triggered; and, third, moral priming has different effects on good and on bad people. Based…
Behavioral Ethics Meets Behavioral Law and Economics
The present chapter maps the literature of ethical decision-making in psychology and management and examines the ways in which it could shape behavioral law and economics. The chapter examines the important paradigms and biases that have been developed in this area. Although there has been a significant advance in the understanding of ethical decision-making, conflicting paradigms attempt to describe how good people are responsible for bad deeds.…
Varieties of regulatory regimes and their effect on citizens’ trust in firms
The regulation of market activity has been largely dominated by governmental command-and-control regulatory design (C&C), which was seen as the safest way to protect the public from potential harm by firms. In recent years, in an effort to move to more relaxed and less burdensome regulation, alternative regulatory tools have been developed, tools that rely on firms or other private actors in the various stages of regulation (self, or smart, regul…
Decentralized enforcement in organizations: An experimental approach
Social enforcement, the decentralized action by organizational actors of monitoring, identifying, and reporting legal violations, is widely recognized as a key factor in ensuring good governance. This article reports on an experimental survey conducted in the US and Israel examining the behavior of individuals when confronting workplace unlawful conduct. The study provides novel insights into the relationships between state based, organization ba…
Motivating Environmental Action in a Pluralistic Regulatory Environment: An Experimental Study of Framing, Crowding Out, and Institutional Effects in the Context of Recycling Policies
In designing a recycling policy, the regulator must choose among multiple instruments. Our study seeks to address the linkages between the choice of regulatory instruments and institutional frameworks, people's intrinsic motivation, and various attitudinal measures. We examined the behavioral repercussions of several instruments that are used widely in recycling regulation, using an experimental survey on a representative sample of the Israeli po…
Honesty pledges for the behaviorally-based regulation of dishonesty
A common regulatory dilemma is determining how much trust authorities can place in people's self-reports, especially in contexts with an incentive to cheat. In such contexts, regulators are typically risk averse and do not readily confer trust, resulting in excessive requirements when applying for permits, licenses, etc. Studies in behavioral ethics have suggested that asking people to ex-ante pledge to behave ethically can reduce their level of …
Experimental analysis of the effect of standards on compliance and performance
Legal directives – whether laws, regulations, or contractual provisions – can be written along a spectrum of specificity, about which behavioral and legal scholarship present conflicting views. We hypothesized that the combination of specificity and monitoring promotes compliance but harms performance and trust, whereas the combination of specificity and good faith enhances both the informative goal‐setting aspects of specificity and people's sen…
Rule orientation and behavior: Development and validation of a scale measuring individual acceptance of rule violation
There is individual variation in the extent to which individuals believe it is acceptable to violate legal rules. However, we lack a specific measure that assesses this key internal element of legal decision-making and offending. This article describes the development, validation, and testing of the Rule Orientation scale. At its core, the construct captures the extent to which one thinks about rules in a rigid, rule-oriented manner or in a manne…
Commonsense Morality and the Ethics of Killing in War: An Experimental Survey of the Israeli Population
The morality of killing in war, which has been the subject of debate among philosophers and legal scholars, focuses on two main approaches: the “traditional” and the “revisionist.” The traditional approach argues for symmetry: soldiers of both sides are liable to be killed, whether or not the war they fight is just; civilians are immune from being harmed whether or not they are responsible for the evil against which the just side fights. Recently…
Mandated justice: The potential promise and possible pitfalls of mandating procedural justice in the workplace
This study addresses the question of whether and how legal authorities ought to intervene in work organizations in order to most effectively regulate the behavior of employees. This question is examined empirically, by exploring whether the association between the level of fairness employees experience in procedures regarding pay and benefits, and their adherence to workplace rules, differs depending upon whether those procedures are enacted by c…
Polarization and Voluntary Compliance: The Impact of Ideological Extremity on the Effectiveness of Self‐Regulation
New governance models increasingly employ self‐regulation tools like pledges and nudges to achieve regulatory compliance. These approaches premise that voluntary compliance emerges from intrinsic motivation to cooperate rather than coercive measures. Central to their success is trust—both in government institutions and among citizens. However, rising societal polarization raises critical questions about the continued effectiveness of self‐regulat…
How pledges reduce dishonesty: The role of involvement and identification
The slippery slope of rights-restricting temporary measures: An Experimental Analysis
Times of emergency often serve as triggers for the creation of new policy. Such policies may involve restriction of human rights, and various mechanisms can be used to mitigate the severity of such restrictions. One such mechanism is the temporary measure. A series of three experiments examined the potential of temporary measures for increasing the likelihood of approval of rights-restricting policy and the role of time – both prospectively and r…
How Law Changes the Environmental Mind: An Experimental Study of the Effect of Legal Norms on Moral Perceptions and Civic Enforcement
This paper examines how different legal instruments affect people's moral intuitions and willingness to engage in social enforcement in the field of environmental law. These instruments vary in terms of their governance technique, the process through which they were enacted, and their allocation of enforcement responsibilities. Their effect on citizens' moral evaluation and emotional reaction to corporate polluting behaviour are examined, based o…
Effectiveness of ex ante honesty oaths in reducing dishonesty depends on content
The Human Mind and Human Rights: A Call for an Integrative Study of the Mechanisms Generating Employment Discrimination across Different Social Categories
The paper highlights how our knowledge about the manner the human mind works and people behave in social interactions may contribute to our understanding of employment discrimination and provide effective ways to address it. It calls for a rigorous empirical study of the mechanisms generating different forms of discrimination against disadvantaged groups and the implications that follow for law and policy. The paper’s focus is theoretical, critic…
Decentralized enforcement in organizations: An experimental approach
Social enforcement, the decentralized action by organizational actors of monitoring, identifying, and reporting legal violations, is widely recognized as a key factor in ensuring good governance. This article reports on an experimental survey conducted in the US and Israel examining the behavior of individuals when confronting workplace unlawful conduct. The study provides novel insights into the relationships between state based, organization ba…
How Law Changes the Environmental Mind: An Experimental Study of the Effect of Legal Norms on Moral Perceptions and Civic Enforcement
This paper examines how different legal instruments affect people's moral intuitions and willingness to engage in social enforcement in the field of environmental law. These instruments vary in terms of their governance technique, the process through which they were enacted, and their allocation of enforcement responsibilities. Their effect on citizens' moral evaluation and emotional reaction to corporate polluting behaviour are examined, based o…
Five Models of Regulatory Compliance Motivation: Empirical Findings and Normative Implications
Mandated justice: The potential promise and possible pitfalls of mandating procedural justice in the workplace
This study addresses the question of whether and how legal authorities ought to intervene in work organizations in order to most effectively regulate the behavior of employees. This question is examined empirically, by exploring whether the association between the level of fairness employees experience in procedures regarding pay and benefits, and their adherence to workplace rules, differs depending upon whether those procedures are enacted by c…
Motivating Environmental Action in a Pluralistic Regulatory Environment: An Experimental Study of Framing, Crowding Out, and Institutional Effects in the Context of Recycling Policies
In designing a recycling policy, the regulator must choose among multiple instruments. Our study seeks to address the linkages between the choice of regulatory instruments and institutional frameworks, people's intrinsic motivation, and various attitudinal measures. We examined the behavioral repercussions of several instruments that are used widely in recycling regulation, using an experimental survey on a representative sample of the Israeli po…
Behavioral Equity
The paper uses the findings of psychology, behavioral economics, and behavioral ethics to revisit three main related assumptions of the rational-choice approach to equity, by developing three main points: first, not only bad people try to circumvent the law; second, behavior depends on the relationship between specificity, trust, and the type of motivation triggered; and, third, moral priming has different effects on good and on bad people. Based…
Behavioral Ethics Meets Behavioral Law and Economics
The present chapter maps the literature of ethical decision-making in psychology and management and examines the ways in which it could shape behavioral law and economics. The chapter examines the important paradigms and biases that have been developed in this area. Although there has been a significant advance in the understanding of ethical decision-making, conflicting paradigms attempt to describe how good people are responsible for bad deeds.…
The Human Mind and Human Rights: A Call for an Integrative Study of the Mechanisms Generating Employment Discrimination across Different Social Categories
The paper highlights how our knowledge about the manner the human mind works and people behave in social interactions may contribute to our understanding of employment discrimination and provide effective ways to address it. It calls for a rigorous empirical study of the mechanisms generating different forms of discrimination against disadvantaged groups and the implications that follow for law and policy. The paper’s focus is theoretical, critic…
Commonsense Morality and the Ethics of Killing in War: An Experimental Survey of the Israeli Population
The morality of killing in war, which has been the subject of debate among philosophers and legal scholars, focuses on two main approaches: the “traditional” and the “revisionist.” The traditional approach argues for symmetry: soldiers of both sides are liable to be killed, whether or not the war they fight is just; civilians are immune from being harmed whether or not they are responsible for the evil against which the just side fights. Recently…
Rule orientation and behavior: Development and validation of a scale measuring individual acceptance of rule violation
There is individual variation in the extent to which individuals believe it is acceptable to violate legal rules. However, we lack a specific measure that assesses this key internal element of legal decision-making and offending. This article describes the development, validation, and testing of the Rule Orientation scale. At its core, the construct captures the extent to which one thinks about rules in a rigid, rule-oriented manner or in a manne…
The Law of Good People: Challenging States' Ability to Regulate Human Behavior
Currently, the dominant enforcement paradigm is based on the idea that states deal with 'bad people' - or those pursuing their own self-interests - with laws that exact a price for misbehavior through sanctions and punishment. At the same time, by contrast, behavioral ethics posits that 'good people' are guided by cognitive processes and biases that enable them to bend the laws within the confines of their conscience. In this illuminating book, Y…
The Provocative Effect of Law: Majority Nationalism and Minority Discrimination
Western societies have experienced ethnic and religious diversification in recent decades. These demographic changes have been met by efforts to defend the local dominant culture using majority nationalism laws, intended to protect the cultural heritage of the majority. We empirically examine majority nationalism laws’ expressive effects on patterns of minority discrimination using the Israeli draft Nation Law (NL) as a case study. Drawing on two…
Experimental analysis of the effect of standards on compliance and performance
Legal directives – whether laws, regulations, or contractual provisions – can be written along a spectrum of specificity, about which behavioral and legal scholarship present conflicting views. We hypothesized that the combination of specificity and monitoring promotes compliance but harms performance and trust, whereas the combination of specificity and good faith enhances both the informative goal‐setting aspects of specificity and people's sen…
The slippery slope of rights-restricting temporary measures: An Experimental Analysis
Times of emergency often serve as triggers for the creation of new policy. Such policies may involve restriction of human rights, and various mechanisms can be used to mitigate the severity of such restrictions. One such mechanism is the temporary measure. A series of three experiments examined the potential of temporary measures for increasing the likelihood of approval of rights-restricting policy and the role of time – both prospectively and r…
Preference Change and Behavioral Ethics: Can States Create Ethical People
Law and economics scholarship suggests that, in appropriate cases, the law can improve people’s behavior by changing their preferences. For example, the law can curb discriminatory hiring practices by providing employers with information that might change their discriminatory preference. Supposedly, if employers no longer prefer one class of employees to another, they will simply stop discriminating, with no need for further legal intervention. T…
Honesty pledges for the behaviorally-based regulation of dishonesty
A common regulatory dilemma is determining how much trust authorities can place in people's self-reports, especially in contexts with an incentive to cheat. In such contexts, regulators are typically risk averse and do not readily confer trust, resulting in excessive requirements when applying for permits, licenses, etc. Studies in behavioral ethics have suggested that asking people to ex-ante pledge to behave ethically can reduce their level of …
Majority Nationalism Laws and the Equal Citizenship of Minorities: Experimental, Panel, and Cross-Sectional Evidence from Israel
Western societies are increasingly enacting majority nationalism laws to strengthen majority culture. We propose that these laws may alter attitudes about minorities’ equal citizenship with varied impact on majorities and minorities. To explore this issue, we examine the impact of Israel’s recently enacted Nation Law on the Jewish majority and the Arab minority. Experimental evidence from before the law’s enactment reveals that both minority and …
Does personalization of officeholders undermine the legitimacy of the office? On perceptions of objectivity in legal decisionmaking
Public legitimation of legal decisionmaking can be promoted through various strategies. We examine strategies of legitimation that are premised on personalizing the public image of legal agents. A personalized public administration emphasizes individual decisionmakers and seeks legitimacy through familiarity with the character, identity, and virtues of individual agents, whereas a non‐personalized public administration projects an ethos of techno…
Affidavit aversion: Public preferences for trust‐based policy instruments
Regulators who aim to reduce administrative burdens often promote trust‐based policy instruments, such as legal affidavits or honesty pledges, as substitutes to traditional bureaucratic procedures. However, little is known on how the general public view such instruments, and whether people would actually comply with them, and under what circumstances. Using a series of experimental vignettes, we examine public preferences toward these instruments…
Cross-Theoretical Compliance: An Integrative Compliance Analysis of Covid-19 Mitigation Responses in Israel
To understand the question why people obey or break rules, different approaches have focused on different theories and subsets of variables. The present research develops a cross-theoretical approach that integrates these perspectives. We apply this in a survey of compliance with COVID-19 pandemic mitigation rules in Israel. The data reveal that compliance in this setting was shaped by a combination of variables originating from legitimacy, capac…
Varieties of regulatory regimes and their effect on citizens’ trust in firms
The regulation of market activity has been largely dominated by governmental command-and-control regulatory design (C&C), which was seen as the safest way to protect the public from potential harm by firms. In recent years, in an effort to move to more relaxed and less burdensome regulation, alternative regulatory tools have been developed, tools that rely on firms or other private actors in the various stages of regulation (self, or smart, regul…
The obligation to obey the law: Exploring National Differences
People vary in the extent to which they generally feel obligated to obey the law. The Obligation to Obey the Law (OOL) plays a major role in how people respond to legal rules and whether they comply or violate such rules. Most existing research on OOL has been non-comparative. The present paper explores national differences in OOL by analyzing data from a survey conducted among a convenience sample ( n = 716) of law students in the Netherlands, t…
Effectiveness of Ex-Ante Honesty Oaths in Reducing Dishonesty Depends on Content
Dishonest behaviors such as tax evasion impose significant societal costs. Ex-ante honesty oaths—commitments to honesty before action—have been proposed as interventions to counteract dishonest behavior, but the heterogeneity in findings across operationalizations calls their effectiveness into question. We tested 21 honesty oaths (including a baseline oath)—proposed, evaluated, and selected by 44 expert researchers—and a no-oath condition in a m…
How pledges reduce dishonesty: The role of involvement and identification
Effectiveness of ex ante honesty oaths in reducing dishonesty depends on content
Law (22 works) · Political science (22 works) · Psychology (22 works) · Social Psychology (19 works) · Economics (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Social Psychology (12 works) · Business (10 works) · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies (10 works) · Politics (8 works)