We experimentally investigate the extent to which social obervability of one's actions and the possibility of social non-monetary judgment affect the decision to engage in rule breaking behavior.  We consider three rule bfeaking scenarios - theft, bribery and embezzlement - in the absence of...

This paper studies the consequences of introducing competition between bureaucrats. Bureaucrats are supposed to grant licences to firms that satisfy certain requirements. Firms have to invest into satisfying these requirements. Some bureaucrats are corrupt, that is, they give the licence to any...

We examine whether credit contributes to business cycle fluctuations by dirctly affecting consumption rather than through the new well understood investment channel.

Whether they are financial, economic, or psychological, discount rates affect most economic decisions: investment and savings, hirings and firings, defaults and refinancing, financial and economic reforms, learning and experimentation, and any other decision with long-term consequences, such as...

Ultimatum games have been extensively used in experimental studies. By studying the consequences that restrictions shared by ultimatum games have in subject`s behaviour, this paper argues that some results are falsified by design constraints. This paper also presets a taxonomy of certification,...

This paper is empirical study, using new experimental data, of repeated game strategies in trust games; its goal is to identify strategies that people use in repeated games. We develop a strategy inference method that maps observed actions to a set of best fitting unobserved repeated game...

Through an experiment this study investigates the effects that verification has on honest traders. This paper demonstrates that by reducing the scope for trust verification can have a negative effect on the behaviour of honest individuals. Specifically, the analysis shows that trustworthy agents...

In the workhorse  model of welfare economics, the elasticity of marginal utility, often denoted as η, serves simultaneously to represent aversion to risk, aversion to spatial inequality, and preferences for intertemporal substitution.  While Kreps-Porteus-Selden and Epstein-Zin preferences...

In this note, we present a novel computerized real effort task based on moving sliders across a screen which overcomes many of the drawbacks of existing real effort tasks.  The task was first developed and used by us in Gill and Prowse (2009).  We outline the design of our "slider task",...

Opportunist land encroachment, resulting from costly and incomplete enforcement of common land boundaries, is a problem in many less-developed countries. A multi-period model of such encroachment is presented in this paper. The model accounts explicitly for the cumulative effects of...