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...

Demotion – a reduction of an employee’s rank and salary - is often mentioned by managers and policy makers as a measure to increase the employability of older workers, but in practice demotion is rarely applied. This paper takes a fresh look at the question of demotion by first employing a...

In this paper we examine the impact of information on individual contributions in a public-bad experiment. We compare two experimental treatments. In the partial information treatment, subjects are only informed about the total contributions by their group, whereas in the full information...

We experimentally investigate coordination games in which cognition plays an important role, i.e. where outcomes are affected by the agents level of understanding of the game and the beliefs they form about each others understanding.We ask whether and when repeated exposure permits agents to...

We analyze the incidence and welfare e¤ects of unit sales taxes in experimental monopoly and Bertrand markets. We nd, in line with economic theory, that rms with no market power are able to shift a high share of a tax burden on to consumers, independent of whether buyers are automated or human...

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...

We establish several stylized facts about the behavior of individual uncertainty and disagreement between individuals when forecasting inflation in the laboratory. Subjects correctly perceive the underlying inflation uncertainty in only 60% of cases, which can be interpreted as the...

Mediation is a conflict resolution method in which a third neutral party provides assistance to the conflict parties.The process of mediation as well as any solution to the conflict arising from it is implemented only by the consent of all conflict parties.It is the role of a mediator to...