The prevailing labour market models assume that minimum wages do not affect the labour supply schedule. We challenge this view in this paper by showing experimentally that minimum wages have significant and lasting effects on subjects’ reservation wages. The temporary introduction of a minimum...

Social preference research has fundamentally changed the way economists think about many important economic and social phenomena. However, the empirical foundation of social preferences is largely based on laboratory experiments with self-selected students as participants. This is potentially...

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...

During the last two decades economists have made much progress in understanding incentives, contracts and organizations. Yet, they constrained their attention to a very narrow and empirically questionable view of human motivation. The purpose of this Paper is to show that this narrow view of...

Economists long considered money illusion to be largely irrelevant. Here we show, however, that money illusion has powerful effects on equilibrium selection. If we represent pay-offs in nominal terms, choices converge to the Pareto inefficient equilibrium; however, if we lift the veil of money...

In this Paper we provide experimental evidence indicating that incentive contracts may cause a strong crowding out of voluntary cooperation. This crowding-out effect constitutes costs of incentive provision that have been largely neglected by economists. In our experiments the crowding-out...

We show that concerns for fairness may have dramatic consequences for the optimal provision of incentives in a moral hazard context. Incentive contracts that are optimal when there are only selfish actors become inferior when some agents are concerned with fairness. Conversely, contracts that...

In recent decades, many firms offered more discretion to their employees, often increasing the productivity of effort but also leaving more opportunities for shirking. These "high-performance work systems" are difficult to understand in terms of standard moral hazard models. We show...

Recent studies found evidence for nominal wage rigidity during periods of relatively high nominal GDP growth. It has been argued, however, that in an environment with low nominal GDP growth, when nominal wage cuts become customary, workers’ opposition to nominal cuts would erode and, hence,...

In this Paper we show that a simple model of fairness preferences explains major experimental regularities of common pool resource (CPR) experiments. The evidence indicates that in standard CPR games without communication and without sanctioning possibilities inefficient excess appropriation is...