Abstract: To boost employees’ performance, firms often offer monetary bonuses when production goals are reached. However, the evidence suggests that the particular level of a goal is critical to the effectiveness of this practice. Goals must be challenging yet achievable. Computing optimal...

Pensioners have increasingly more control over their income streams as a result of<br/>pension reforms, which gives them more freedom to save for their old age. We devise an experiment where subjects face a life-cycle optimization task with lifetime uncertainty and a given lifetime income. The aims...

Abstract: We report results from three well-known experimental paradigms, where we use time, rather than money, as the salient component of subjects’ incentives. The three experiments, commonly employed to study social preferences, are the dictator game, the ultimatum game and the trust game....

One of the long-standing puzzles in economics is why wages do not fall sufficiently in recessions so as to avoid increases in unemployment. Put differently, if the competitive market wage declines, why don't employers simply force their employees to accept lower wages as well? As an alternative...

Laws consist of two components: the 'obligations' they express and the 'incentives' designed to enforce them.In this paper we run a public good experiment to test whether or not obligations have any independent effect on cooperation in social dilemmas.The results show that, for given marginal...