Given the USA`s refusal to ratify there is little hope for the Kyoto agreement on curbing CO2 emissions. This paper thus pledges for a national energy policy beyond Kyoto based on local external effects stemming from the combustion of fossil fuels. Due to varying external effects a national...

In this paper we conduct a laboratory experiment to test the extent to which Moore and Repullo's subgame perfect implementation mechanism induces truth-telling in practice, both in a setting with perfect information and in a setting where buyers and sellers face a small amount of uncertainty...

The assumption that payoff-relevant information is observable but not verifiable is important for many core results in contract, organizational and institutional economics. However, subgame-perfect implementation (SPI) mechanisms - which are based on off-equilibrium arbitration clauses that...

In this paper we study experimentally four remedies to overcome inefficiencies that arise from the incompleteness of contracts. These remedies are reciprocity, repeated game effects, social embeddedness, and incentive contracts. In our baseline treatment we find that reciprocity is a powerful...

We report on several experiments on the optimal allocation of ownership rights. The experiments confirm the property rights approach by showing that the ownership structure affects relationship-specific investments and that subjects attain the most efficient ownership allocation despite starting...

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

We examine experimentally how Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) respond to incentives and how they provide incentives in situations requiring trust and trustworthiness. As a control we compare the behavior of CEOs with the behavior of students. We find that CEOs are considerably more trusting and...

We show experimentally that a principal's distrust in the voluntary performance of an agent has a negative impact on the agent's motivation to perform well. Before the agent chooses his performance, the principal in our experiment decides whether he wants to restrict the agents' choice set by...

Recent evidence highlights the importance of social norms in many economic relations. However, many of these relationships are long-term and provide repeated game incentives for performance. We experimentally investigate interaction effects of reciprocity and repeated game incentives in two...

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 about fairness. Conversely, contracts that...