We conduct a field experiment in a naturally occurring labor environment and track whether the performance of workers responds to unexpected wage increases. Specifically, we investigate how the timing of wage increases affects efforts. We find that workers’ performance is substantially higher...

Without transparency about peer wages in a real effort experiment, a change of wages does not affect performance. With transparency, however, higher paid workers tend to work more accurately, and lower paid workers shirk more under piece rates.

We let subjects estimate behavior and expectations of others before they play dictator games, and only vary the quantitative scales for their estimates. Our data show that this manipulation may significantly affect economic decisions: dictators who are presented a scale with a higher midpoint...

We conduct an Internet dictator game experiment in collaboration with the popular German Sunday paper “Welt am Sonntag”, employing a wider and more representative subject pool than standard laboratory experiments. Recipients either knew or did not know the size of the cake distributed by the...

We study the interplay of inequality and trust in a dynamic growth game, in which trust increases efficiency and thus allows higher growth of the laboratory economy in the future. We find that trust (as measured by the percentage of wealth invested in a trust game) is initially high in a...

We report on two experiments designed to investigate the role of beliefs for ingroup favoritism. On average, dictators transfer substantially more to recipients who are publicly known to share the same group identity, compared to transfers given to recipients who are publicly known to be...