In four studies (S1-S4; N = 320) we investigated whether moral hypocrisy (MH) is motivated by conscious impression management concerns or whether it is self-deceptive. In a dictator game, MH occurred both within participants (saying one thing, doing another; S1) and between participants (doing...

We introduce the give-or-destroy game that allows us to fully elicit an individual s social preference schedule. We find that about one third of the population exhibits both pro-social and anti-social preferences that are independent of payoff comparisons with those who are affected. We call...

We study the role of transparency in a novel three-person profit sharing game in which managers and board directors decide on how to distribute the revenues of a company among themselves and shareholders, who are the residual claimants of the companies revenues. We examine two hypotheses. One is...

We use a representative sample of German establishments to show that those with foreign ownership are more likely to use performance appraisal, profit sharing and employee share ownership than are those with domestic ownership. Moreover, we show that works councils are associated with an...

Managers like to think well of themselves, and of the firms that employ them. However, positive illusions can bias a manager's evaluation of market outcomes, self-servingly crediting success on the superior quality of one's own product but blaming failure on the aggressive price of a...

That institutions matter is widely accepted among economists and so are social norms as an important category of informal institutions. Social norms matter in many economic situations, but in particular for markets. The economic literature has studied the interrelation between markets and social...

Economists have a long tradition in identifying the evolution of cooperation in large, unstructured societies as a puzzle. We suggest a new explanation for cooperation which avoids restrictions of most previous attempts. Our explanation deals with the role of internalized norms for cooperation...

We study the economic consequences of opportunities for dishonesty in an environment where efficiency relevant behaviour is not contractible, but rather incentivized by informal agreements in an ongoing relationship. We document the repeated interaction between a principal and an agent who,...

Successful innovation is a precondition for economic prosperity. While various potential determinants of innovative activity have been considered, little empirical evidence is yet available for the influence of firm governance issues. This paper aims at filling this gap in the literature by...