Quotas for special groups of students often apply in school or university admission procedures. This paper studies the performance of two mechanisms to implement such quotas in a lab experiment. The fi rst mechanism is a simplifi ed version of the mechanism currently employed by the German...

Ambiguity aversion has shown to be economically relevant and has been proposed as an explanation for many phenomena in economics and fi nance. While the literature has suggested a large variety of elicitation methods to measure ambiguity preferences, their consistency and reliability it is...

Do contracts provide reference points that affect ex post behavior? We address this question in a canonical buyer-seller relationship with renegotiation. Our paper provides causal experimental evidence that an initial contract has a highly significant and economically important impact on...

We experimentally investigate the relevance of (asymmetric) outside options in ultimatum bargaining. Building on the generalized equity principle formulated by Selten (1978) we derive three di erent equity rules. These equity rules can explain 43% of all o ers. Our within-subject design allows...

We present the results of an experiment that measures social preferences within couples in a context where intra-household pay-off inequality can be reduced at the cost of diminishing household income. We measure social norms regarding this efficiency-equality trade-off and implement a...

Transparency and accountability are often regarded as crucial for good governance and the efficient organization of public affairs. To systematically explore the impact of transparency and accountability on cooperation, we conduct a series of laboratory experiments on a variation of the public...

Public goods provision often involves groups of contributors repeatedly interacting with administrators who can extract rents from the pool of contributions. We suggest a novel identification approach that exploits the sequential ordering of decisions in a panel vector autoregressive model to...

Similar looking Lorenz Curves can imply very different income density functions and potentially lead to wrong policy implications regarding inequality. This paper derives a relation between a Lorenz Curve and the modality of its underlying income density: Given a parametric Lorenz Curve, it is...

Much empirical research in economics is based on data from household surveys. Panel surveys are particularly valuable for understanding dynamics and heterogeneity. A possible concern with panel surveys is that survey participation itself may alter subsequent behavior. We provide novel evidence...

Attorneys elected to the US House of Representatives and to US state legislatures are systematically less likely to vote in favor of tort reforms that restrict tort litigation, but more likely to support bills that extend tort law. This finding is based on the analysis of 54 votes at the federal...