Empirical work on Akerlof’s theory of gift exchange in labor markets has concentrated on the fair wage-effort hypothesis. In fact, however, the theory also contains a social component that stipulates that homogenous agents that are employed for the same wage level will exert more effort,...

Team success relies on assigning team members to the right tasks. We use controlled experiments to study how roles are assigned within teams and how this affects team performance. Subjects play the takeover game in pairs consisting of a buyer and a seller. Understanding optimal play is very...

We conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate the impact of institutions and institutional choice on truth-telling and trust in sender-receiver games. We find that in an institution with sanctioning opportunities, receivers sanction predominantly after having trusted lies. Individuals who...

This study examines how employees internalize differences in social distance between themselves and their managers when they are competing for a reward given by the manager. In an employer/employee relationship, this difference in social distance between the employer and the various employees...

In an experiment, we study risk-taking of cohabitating student couples, finding that couples’ decisions are closer to risk-neutrality than single partners’ decisions. This finding is similar to earlier experiments with randomly assigned groups, corroborating external validity of earlier results.

In this paper we present results from experimental asset markets and simulations with traders who receive asymmetric information about the fundamental value of an asset. In the experimental markets with repetition insiders outperform the market and uninformed computerized random traders...

This paper considers the effect of status or relative income on work effort, combining experimental evidence from a gift-exchange game with the analysis of multi-country ISSP survey data. We find a consistent negative effect of others' incomes on individual effort in both datasets. The...

A major finding from research into the sources of subjective well-being is that individuals exhibit a "baseline" level of happiness. We explore the influence of genetic variation by employing a twin design and genetic association study. We first show that about 33% of the variation in happiness...

Empirical research often requires a method how to convert a deterministic economic theory into an econometric model. A popular method is to add a random error term on the utility scale. This method, however, violates stochastic dominance. A modification of this method is proposed to avoid...

This paper studies the effect of providing relative performance feedback information on individuals' performance and affective response, under both piece-rate and flat-rate incentives. In a laboratory setup, agents perform a real effort task and when receiving feedback, they are asked to rate...