We consider guilt averse agents and principals and study the effects ofguilt on optimal behavior of the principal and the agent in a moral hazardmodel.The principal’s contract proposal contains a target effort in addition tothe monetary incentive scheme. By accepting the agreement, the...

We analyse pricing, e¤ort and tipping decisions in the online service GoogleAnswers. While users set a price for the answer to their question ex ante, theycan additionally give a tip to the researcher ex post.In line with the related experimental literature we …nd evidence that tippingis...

Amidst a sharp increase in household debt levels, many countries have substantially reformedtheir consumer bankruptcy regulations. I first classify the mechanisms triggered by current U.S.and European bankruptcy regulations and then evaluate these mechanisms within a hidden actionmodel. I...

Previous research indicates that risky and uncertain marginal returnsfrom the public good significantly lower contributions. This paper presentsexperimental results illustrating that the effects of risk and uncertainty dependon the employed parameterization. Specifically, if the value of the...

The notion of choice inconsistency is widely spread in the literature on behavioraleconomics. Several approaches were used to account for the observation that peoplereverse their choices over time. This paper aims to explain the formation of resolutionsregarded as internal self-binding devices....

We study two person-betting games with inconsistent commonly know beliefs, using an experimentalapproach. In our experimental games, participants bet against one another, each bettorchoosing one of two possible outcomes, and payoff odds are know at the time bets are placed.Bettors’ beliefs are...

This paper provides a new way to identify conditional cooperationin a real-time version of the standard voluntary contribution mechanism. Ourapproach avoids most drawbacks of the traditional procedures because it relieson endogenous cycle lengths, which are defined by the number of contributors...

We analyze the effects of asymmetric information concerning thesize of a pie on proposer behavior in three different bargaining situations:the ultimatum game, the Yes-No-game and the dictator game.Our data show that (a) irrespective of the information condition, proposergenerosity increases with...

During the last three decades the ascent of behavioral economics clearly helped tobring down artificial disciplinary boundaries between psychology and economics.Noting that behavioral economics seems still under the spell of the rational choicetradition – and, indirectly, of behaviorism – we...

Which inequalities among individuals are considered unjust? This paper reportsthe results of an experiment designed to study distributive choices dealing with arbitrarilyunequal initial endowments. In a three-person distribution problem wheresubjects either know or do not know their endowments,...