We analyse pricing, effort and tipping decisions in the online service "Google Answers" While users set a price for the answer to their question ex ante, they can additionally give a tip to the researcher ex post. In line with the related experimental literature we find evidence that tipping is...

The paper analyses the payment behaviour of customers of the online music label Magnatune. Customers may pay what they want for albums, as long as the payment is within a given price range ($5-$18). Magnatune’s comprehensive pre-purchase access facilitates music discovery and allows an...

Typically, laboratory experiments suffer from homogeneous subject pools and selfselection biases. The usefulness of survey data is limited by measurement error and by the questionability of their behavioral relevance. Here we present a method integrating interactive experiments and...

Many Colombians are confronted with the ongoing conflict that influences their decision making in everyday life, including their behavior in labor markets. This study focuses on the impact of violent conflict on self-employment, enlarging the usual determinants with a set of conflict variables....

We extend evidence on the interaction between financial incentives and cognitive abilities by focusing on the effect of task-specific abilities. In a memory-intensive task situated in an accounting context, the effect of accounting education on performance is stronger under financial incentives...

Many economic experiments are run in the laboratory with students as participants. In this paper we use a newspaper experiment to learn more about external validity of lab research. Our workhorse is the Yes-No game. Unlike in ultimatum games responders of the Yes-No games do not know the...

While social relationships play an important role for individuals to cope with missing market institutions, they also limit individuals' range of trading partners. This paper aims at understanding the determinants of trust at various social distances when information asymmetries are present....

We conduct a natural field experiment on direct and indirect transfer mechanisms for small donations. Charitable contributions are significantly higher if made indirectly, i.e. if they are tied to the purchase of a good sold at a premium, than if they are made directly. Donations are...

This paper presents new evidence on the distribution of risk attitudes in the population, using a novel set of survey questions and a representative sample of roughly 22,000 individuals living in Germany. Using a question that asks about willingness to take risks on an 11-point scale, we find...

Changes in communication technology have allowed for the expansion of data collection modes in survey research. The proliferation of the computer has allowed the creation of web and computer assisted auto-interview data collection modes. Virtual worlds are a new application of computer...