The behavioral relevance of non-binding defaults is well established. While most research has focused on decision makers’ responses to a given default, we argue that this individual decision making perspective is incomplete. Instead, a comprehensive understanding of default effects requires to...

Lecture on the first SFB/TR 15 meeting, Gummersbach, July, 18 - 20, 2004: We report results of an internet experiment designed to test the theory of informational cascades in financial markets (Avery and Zemsky, AER, 1998). More than 6400 subjects, including a subsample of 267 consultants from...

We present a field experiment to assess the effect of own and peer wage variations on actual work effort of employees with hourly wages. Work effort neither reacts to an increase of the own wage, nor to a positive or negative peer comparison. This result seems at odds with numerous laboratory...

We present a field experiment to assess the effect of own and peer wage variations on actual work effort of employees with hourly wages. Work effort neither reacts to an increase of the own wage, nor to a positive or negative peer comparison. This result seems at odds with numerous laboratory...

Several recent papers argue that contracts provide reference points that affect ex post behavior. We test this hypothesis in a canonical buyer-seller relationship with renegotiation. Our paper provides causal experimental evidence that an initial contract has a highly significant and...

According to several psychological and economic studies, non-binding communication can be an effective tool to increase trust and enhance cooperation. This paper focuses on reasons why people stick to a given promise and analyzes to what extent image concerns of being perceived as a promise...

We analyze how subjects' self-assessment depends on whether its accuracy is observable to others. We find that women downgrade their self-assessment given observability while men do not. Women avoid the shame they may have if others observe that they overestimated themselves. Men, however, do...

In corporate practice, incentive schemes are often complicated even for simple tasks. Hence, the way they are communicated might matter. In a controlled field experiment, we study a minimally invasive change in the communication of a well-established incentive scheme - a reminder regarding the...

We study how website defaults affect consumer behavior in the domain of charitable giving. In a field experiment that was conducted on a large platform for making charitable donations over the web, we exogenously vary the default options in two distinct choice dimensions. The first pertains to...

We provide evidence that German savings banks - where local politicians are by law involved in their management - systematically adjust lending policies in response to local electoral cycles. The different timing of county elections across states and the existence of a control group of...