We develop and test experimentally the argument that gender/family and/or professional identities, activated through psychological priming, may influence preference for competition. We focus on female professionals for whom these identities may conflict and male professionals for whom they may...

We demonstrate that effectiveness of performance-contingent incentives is inversely related to individual risk-aversion levels through two mechanisms: 1) rational optimizing decisions about the amount of effort to supply when effort is positively correlated with risk exposure and 2) the possibly...

We compare misrepresentations of performance under a target-based compensation system with those under both a linear piece-rate system and a tournament-based bonus system using a laboratory experiment with salient financial incentives. An anagram game was employed as the experimental task....

New Zealand firms exhibit significant variation in the extent to which they formally involve CEOs in the executive pay-setting process: a considerable number sit on the compensation committee, while others are excluded from the board altogether. Using 1997-2005 data, we find that CEOs who sit on...

We analyze a model with two-dimensional asymmetric information where the employer has better information about the firm's earnings potential and the employee is subject to moral hazard. The employee's contract consists of an annual bonus and stock options. We focus on two issues: how different...

Will generous return policies in auctions benefit bidders? We investigate this issue using second-price common-value auctions. Theoretically, we find that the bidding equilibrium is unique unless returns are free, in which case there exist multiple equilibria with different implications for...

We develop, and experimentally test, models of informal agreements. Agents are assumed to be honest but suffer costs of overcoming temptations. We extend two classical bargaining solutions -- split-the-difference and deal-me-out -- to this informal agreement setting. For each solution there are...

Charness and Dufwenberg (2006) find that promises increase cooperation and suggest that the behavior of subjects in their experiment is driven by guilt aversion. By modifying the procedures to include a double blind social distance protocol we test an alternative explanation that promise keeping...

Should one use words or money to foster trust of the other party if no means of enforcing trustworthiness are available? This paper reports an experiment studying the effectiveness of two types of mechanisms for promoting trust: a costly gift and a costless message as well as their mutual...

Previous research has suggested that communication and especially promises increase cooperation in laboratory experiments. This has been taken as evidence for internal motivations such as guilt aversion or preference for promise keeping. The original goal of this paper was to examine promises...