About

Roland J. M. Bénabou is the Theodore A. Wells '29 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, where he joined the faculty in 1999. He holds a joint appointment in the Department of Economics and the School of Public and International Affairs. His research spans both macroeconomic and microeconomic areas, including the interplay of inflation and imperfect competition, as well as speculation and manipulation in financial markets. His recent work focuses on three main areas: the relationship between inequality, growth, social mobility, and the political economy of redistribution; the role of education, social interactions, and the socioeconomic structure of cities; and the intersection of economics and psychology, particularly behavioral economics, examining extrinsic incentives versus intrinsic motivation, prosocial behavior, and motivated beliefs at both individual and collective levels. Bénabou is a distinguished member of numerous academic societies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and the French Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. He has served as a coeditor of the American Economic Review and has been involved with various other leading economic journals. His academic credentials include a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Economics
• Natural resource economics
• Development economics
• Law
• Microeconomics
• Market economy
• Political economy

Selected publications

• Identity as Self-Image

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Laws and Norms

  Journal of Political Economy · 2025-08-25 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  National audience

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• (Pro-)Social Learning and Strategic Disclosure

  American Economic Journal Microeconomics · 2025-10-28

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We study a sequential experimentation model with endogenous feedback. Agents choose between a safe and risky action, the latter generating stochastic rewards. When making this choice, each agent is selfishly motivated (myopic). However, agents can disclose their experiences to a public record, and when doing so are prosocially motivated (forward-looking). Disclosure is both polarized (only extreme signals are disclosed) and positively biased (no feedback is bad news). The extent of disclosure is non-monotone in prior uncertainty. Subsidizing disclosure costs can paradoxically lead to less disclosure, but more experimentation. (JEL D81, D82, D83)

  PublisherDOI

• Identity as Self-Image

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• (Pro-) Social Learning and Strategic Disclosure

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-05-01

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We study a sequential experimentation model with endogenous feedback.Agents choose between a safe and risky action, the latter generating stochastic rewards.When making this choice, each agent is selfishly motivated (myopic).However, agents can disclose their experiences to a public record, and when doing so are pro-socially motivated (forward-looking).When prior uncertainty is large, disclosure is both polarized (only extreme signals are disclosed) and positively biased (no feedback is bad news).When prior uncertainty is small, a novel form of unraveling occurs and disclosure is complete.Subsidizing disclosure costs can perversely lead to less disclosure but more experimentation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Ends versus Means: Kantians, Utilitarians, and Moral Decisions

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-01-01 · 6 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Choosing what is morally right can be based on the consequences (ends) resulting from the decision -the Consequentialist view -or on the conformity of the means involved with some overarching notion of duty -the Deontological view.Using a series of experiments, we investigate the overall prevalence and the consistency of consequentialist and deontological decision-making, when these two moral principles come into conflict.Our design includes a realstakes version of the classical trolley dilemma, four novel games that induce ends-versus-means tradeoffs, and a rule-following task.These six main games are supplemented with six classical self-versus-other choice tasks, allowing us to relate consequential/deontological behavior to standard measures of prosociality.Across the six main games, we find a sizeable prevalence (20 to 44%) of nonconsequentialist choices by subjects, but no evidence of stable individual preference types across situations.In particular, trolley behavior predicts no other ends-versusmeans choices.Instead, which moral principle prevails appears to be context-dependent.In contrast, we find a substantial level of consistency across self-versus-other decisions, but individuals' degree of prosociality is unrelated to how they choose in ends-versus-means tradeoffs.

  PublisherDOI

• Ends Versus Means: Kantians, Utilitarians, and Moral Decisions

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Offering, Asking, Consenting, and Rejecting: The Psychology of Helping Interactions

  2024-04-16

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Two distinct literatures have shown that people are averse to being rejected when requesting help, and to rejecting others’ requests for help; both parties prefer situations in which no ask was made to those in which an ask was made but rejected. We propose a game-theoretic framework that offers a parsimonious explanation for both phenomena and further extends them. In this framework, people who need help make inferences and care about what an offer of help, compliance with a help request, or rejection of a request signals about the potential help-giver’s concern for them or the relationship. Likewise, potential help-givers care about the inferences potential help-receivers make, as they want to appear caring. We propose that both the aversion to being rejected after an ask and the aversion to rejecting others after an ask can be explained by the fact that rejection provides a negative signal about how much the would-be helper cares about or values the person in need. The framework further predicts that the same mechanism leads to an aversion to asks even when help is provided. That is, holding constant whether help is provided, both parties incur a psychological cost whenever there is an ask. Two studies, one involving recollections of help-related experiences, provide empirical support for the framework. By bringing together disparate literatures in help-seeking and -giving, we uncover common psychological features underlying these economically and socially important behaviors, generate novel insights into how they can be encouraged, and draw connections to behaviors in related domains.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• (Pro-)Social Learning and Strategic Disclosure

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• It hurts to ask

  European Economic Review · 2024-11-26 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Identity and Ideology: Cognitive Foundations and Policy Implications

  NSF · $136k · 2004–2007

Frequent coauthors

• Jean Tirole

  Toulouse School of Economics

  228 shared

• Andrea Vindigni

  IZA - Institute of Labor Economics

  103 shared

• Davide Ticchi

  Marche Polytechnic University

  89 shared

• Marco Battaglini

  25 shared

• Armin Falk

  BRIQ Institute on Behavior and Inequality

  25 shared

• Philippe Aghion

  Collège de France

  20 shared

• George Loewenstein

  19 shared

• S. Nageeb Ali

  14 shared

Awards & honors

• Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Corresponding member of the French Académie des Sciences Mor…
• Fellow of the Econometric Society
• Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Resear…
• Research Fellow of the Center for Economic Policy Research