Under weak contract enforcement the trading parties' trust, defined as their belief in other's trustworthiness, appears important for realizing gains from trade. In contrast, under strong contract enforcement beliefs about other's trustworthiness appear less important, suggesting that trust and...

An auction is externality-robust if unilateral deviations from equilibrium leave the other bidders' payoffs unaffected. The equilibrium and its outcome will then persist if certain types of externalities arise between bidders. One example are externalities due to spiteful preferences, which have...

In many occupations, workers' labor supply choices are constrained by institutional rules regulating labor time and effort provision. This renders explicit tests of the neoclassical theory of labor supply difficult. Here we present evidence from studies examining labor supply responses in...

Geduld als Basis für Lebenserfolg ist nicht nur eine Frage der Biologie und Vererbung, sondern die Eltern-Kind-Interaktion und frühkindliche Sozialisation, scheint auch im Bereich der Zeitpräferenz die „Wiege des Handelns“ zu sein. In der vorliegenden Studie werden anhand einer...

Employment contracts give a principal the authority to decide flexibly which task his agent should execute. However, there is a tradeoff, first pointed out by Simon (1951), between flexibility and employer moral hazard. An employment contract allows the principal to adjust the task quickly to...

In Bartling, Fehr, and Schmidt (2012) we show theoretically and experimentally that it is optimal to grant discretion to workers if (i) discretion increases productivity, (ii) workers can be screened by past performance, (iii) some workers reciprocate high wages with high effort, and (iv)...