We conduct a laboratory experiment with a constant-sum sender-receiver game to investigate the impact of individuals' first- and second-order beliefs on truth-telling. While senders are more likely to lie if they expect the receiver to trust their message (which is in line with expected payoff...

This paper investigates how heterogeneity in contestants' investment costs affects the competition intensity in a dynamic elimination contest. Theory predicts that the absolute level of investment costs has no effect on the competition intensity in homogeneous interactions. Relative cost...

This paper investigates the implications of different prize structures on effort provision in dynamic (two-stage) elimination contests. Theoretical results show that, for risk-neutral participants, a structure with a single prize for the winner of the contest maximizes total effort, while a...

We investigate how heterogeneity in contestants' investment costs affects competition expenditures in a dynamic elimination contest with different seeding variants of contestants. Theory predicts that expenditures in dynamic contests are lower when competitors are heterogeneous than when they...

We show in a public goods experiment on three continents that conditional cooperation is a universal behavioral regularity. Yet, the number of conditional cooperators and the extent of conditional cooperation are much higher in the U.S.A. than anywhere else. -- conditional cooperation ; public...

We investigate how group boundaries, and the economic environment surrounding groups, affect altruistic cooperation and punishment behavior. Our study uses experiments conducted with 525 officers in the Swiss Army, and exploits random assignment to platoons. We find that, without competition...