In this paper we develop a theory of patenting in which a firm preserves its reputation to only apply for a patent whenever a truly patentable idea has been generated. Firms have a short-run incentive to deviate and receive additional rents from unworthy pending patents, as well as potential...

We test experimentally an explanation of over and under confidence as motivated by (perhaps unconscious) strategic concerns, and find compelling evidence supporting this hypothesis in the behavior of participants who send and respond to others’ statements of confidence about how well they have...

It is well-known that the distribution of citations to articles in a journal is skewed. We ask whether journal rankings based on the impact factor are robust with respect to this fact. We exclude the most cited paper, the top 5 and 10 cited papers for 100 economics journals and recalculate the...

Explaining individual behavior in politics should rely on the same motivational assumptions as explaining behavior in the market: That’s what Political Economy, understood as the application of economics to the study of political processes, is all about. In its standard variant, those who...

We apply the test of Ijiri and Simon (1974) to a large data set of authors in economics. This test has been used by Tol (2009, 2013a) to identify a (within-author) Matthew effect for authors based on citations. We show that the test is quite sensitive to its underlying assumptions and identifies...

In socio-economic sciences the RePEc network (Research Papers in Economics) has become an essential source for the gathering and the spread of both existing and new economic research. Furthermore, it is currently the largest bibliometric database in economic sciences containing 33 different...

Although reciprocity is a key concept in the social sciences, it is still unclear why people engage in costly reciprocation. In this study, physiological and self-report measures were employed to investigate the role of emotions, using the Power-to-Take Game. In this 2-person game, player 1 can...

We explore the influence of genetic variation on subjective well-being by employing a twin design and genetic association study. In a nationally-representative twin sample, we first show that about 33% of the variation in life satisfaction is explained by genetic variation. Although previous...

From the viewpoint of the independence axiom of expected utility theory, an interesting empirical dynamic choice problem involves the presence of a “global risk”, that is, a chance of losing everything whichever safe or risky option is chosen. In this experimental study, participants have to...

The power-to-take game is a simple two player game where players are randomly divided into pairs consisting of a take authority and responder. Both players in each pair have earned an income in an individual real effort decision-making experiment preceding the take game. The game consists of two...