We study whether selection affects motivation. In our experiment subjects first answer a personality questionnaire. They then play a 3-person game. One of the three players decides between an outside option assigning him a positive amount, but leaving the two others empty-handed and allowing one...

Modern 'principal-agent theory' has made a lot of progress in proposing theoretical Solutions to agency problems. This paper contributes to a better understanding of behavior in agency situations. In particular, we provide experimental evidence on offered contracts and effort choices in a simple...

This article studies the design of optimal mechanisms to regulate entry in natural oligopoly markets, assuming the regulator is unable to control the behavior of firms once they are in the market. We adapt the Clarke-Groves mechanism, characterize the optimal mechanism that maximizes the...

The theory of career mobility (Sicherman and Galor 1990) claims that wage penalties for overeducated workers are compensated by better promotion prospects. Sicherman (1991) was able to confirm this theory in an empirical study. However, the controls for the opposing phenomenon of undereducation...

Studying evolutionarily successful behavior we show in a general framework that when individuals maximizing payoff differentials invest resources in punishing others. Interestingly, these investments are increasing in individuals, own wealth and decreasing in the wealth of others.

The findings on the ultimatum game are considered as belonging to the most robust experimental results. In this paper we present a slightly altered version of the mini ultimatum game of Bolton and Zwick (1995). Whereas in the latter exactly equal splits were feasible in our games these were...

The study of evolutionary dynamics was so far mainly restricted to finite strategy spaces. In this paper we show that this restriction is in most cases unnecessary. We give a mild condition under which the continuous time replicator dynamics are well defined for infinite strategy spaces....

Whoever exists belongs to a species, which did not become extinct, has a (geno-) type, which should be well adjusted, and lives in a habitat which has been sustainable for a long time. To capture the first aspect we allow for interspecies competition and analyze the conditions for species...