Essays on Promises, Trust and Disclosure’ consists of three chapters. The first chapter studies whether disclosure of advisors’ interests to advice recipients can mitigate the problem of biased advice. The results of the study suggest that deceptive advice and mistrust are equally frequent with or without disclosure. The second chapter reports on a study that tests whether people keep their promises because they want their actions to be consistent with their words irrespective of the effect of their promise on the person to whom the promise is made. The results do not provide support for this explanation of promise keeping. In addition, the results suggest that the positive impact of communication on cooperation does not always depend on promises. The final chapter of the thesis studies how promises elicited by one’s partner, as opposed to volunteered promises, affect behavior. No significant differences in promise keeping rates between elicited and voluntary promises are found. Nevertheless, the results also suggest that eliciting a promise from one’s partner might be better than not eliciting it because the latter might be perceived as a signal of mistrust and skepticism by some people
