One potential reason for bubbles evolving prior to the financial crisis was excessive risk taking stemming from option-like incentive schemes in financial institutions. By running laboratory asset markets, we investigate the impact of option-like incentives on price formation and trading...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate how social comparison and motivation to compete account for elevated risk-taking in fund management corroborated by asset market experiments when performance depends on rank-based incentives. Design/methodology/approach: In two laboratory...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to review behavioral explanations of the empirical observation that investment managers in mutual fund companies increase their risk taking when offered incentives based on how their performance is ranked compared to peers. Design/methodology/approach: A...

Trading in FX markets is dominated by two microstructures: exchanges with market makers and OTC-markets without market makers. Using laboratory experiments we test whether the impact of a Tobin tax is different in these two market microstructures. We find that (i) in markets without market...

How people are incentivized is one of the main drivers of how they behave. In laboratory asset markets we evaluate the impact of four trader incentive bonus, bonus with cap, linear, and penalty – on asset prices and trader behavior. We find that (i) an asset with identical expected dividend...