Free riding problems can be more severe in multiple-person social dilemmas than in two-person dilemmas, since agents can hide their actions behind the veil of anonymity. In this paper, we use field data on waste sorting to study the effect of visibility in social dilemmas. We compare the sorting...

We conduct a laboratory experiment with agents working on and principals benefiting from a real effort task in which the agents’ effort/performance can only be evaluated subjectively. Principals give subjective performance feedback to agents and agents have an opportunity to sanction...

Recent studies have tested the preference axioms of completeness and transitivity, and have detected other preference phenomena such as unstability, learning- and tiredness effects, ordering effects and dominance, in stated preference discrete choice experiments. However, it has not been...

We show that individuals’ desire to protect their self-esteem against ego-threatening feedback can mitigate moral hazard in environments with purely subjective performance evaluations. In line with evidence from social psychology we assume that agents’ react aggressively to evaluations by...

There is abundant evidence that many individuals violate the rationality assumptions routinely made in economics. However, powerful evidence also indicates that violations of individual rationality do not necessarily refute the aggregate predictions of standard economic models that assume full...

Cost-benefit and health policy studies often model a consequence occurring over time as a continuous stream of events. Such a consequence is measured by the rates at which events occur or by the states that occur, and the value of the consequence is measured by an integral. This paper presents a...

We investigate the “law of small numbers” using a unique panel data set on lotto gambling. Because we can track individual players over time, we can measure how they react to outcomes of recent lotto drawings. We can therefore test whether they behave as if they believe they can predict...

In this paper we provide new evidence showing that fair behavior is intuitive to most people. We find a strong association between a short response time and fair behavior in the dictator game. This association is robust to controls that take account of the fact that response time might be...

Consumers are assumed to be unable to discriminate between two goods of differing qualities provided that the qualities are close enough. It is shown that in a vertically differentiated duopoly this results in multiple equilibria. Demand for each firm's good is reduced. Firms' profits may be...

We study risk taking on behalf of others,both with and without potential losses. A large-scale incentivized experiment is conducted with subjects randomly drawn from the Danish population. On average, decision makers take the same risks for other people as for themselves when losses are...