Numerous gift exchange experiments have found a positive relationship between employers' wage offers and workers' effort levels. In (almost) all these experiments the employer both owns and controls the firm. Yet in reality many firms are characterized by the separation of ownership and control....

We investigate expectation formation in a controlled experimental en- vironment. Subjects are asked to predict the price in a standard asset pricing model. They do not have knowledge of the underlying market equilibrium equa- tions, but they know all past realized prices and their own...

While most papers on team decision-making find teams to behave more selfish, less trusting and less altruistic than individuals, Cason and Mui (1997) report that teams are more altruistic than individuals in a dictator game. Using a within-subjects design we re-examine group polarization by...

We study the impact of advice or observation on the depth of reasoning in an experimental beauty-contest game. Both sources of information trigger faster convergence to the equilibrium. Yet, we find that subjects who receive naïve advice outperform uninformed subjects permanently, whereas...

The main contribution of this study is the finding that round numbers can act as price barriers for individual stocks. In addition, a first step is made to explain this and the related phenomena of round number clustering by testing two competing hypotheses, using data from the Dutch stock...

We consider repeated trust game experiments to study the interplay between explicit and relational incentives. After having gained experience with two payoff variations of the trust game, subjects in the final part explicitly choose which of these two variants to play. Theory predicts that...

This study attempts to combine two traditional fields in microeconomics: individual decision making under risk and decision making in an interpersonal context. The influence of social comparison on risky choices is explored in an experiment in which participants make a series of choices between...

The strategy method is becoming an important tool in experimental methodology. This study examines how well this method works in an individual decision experiment. Subjects are faced with a sequential search problem. After extensive practice solving the problem and formulating strategies, they...

Incentive instruments like asset ownership and performance pay often have to strike a balance between the productive incentives and the rent-seeking incentives they provide. Standard theory predicts that a given instrument becomes less attractive when the effectiveness of rent-seeking activities...

One of the main findings of a large body of gift exchange experiments is that in an incomplete contracts environment workers on average do not shirk and usually provide more than the minimum enforceable effort level. In general, 40 to 60 percent of the workers reward higher wages with higher...