Abundant evidence suggests that high levels of contributions to public goods can be sustained through self-governed monitoring and sanctions. This experimental study investigates the effectiveness of decentralized sanctioning institutions where punishment opportunities are restricted to agents...

This paper examines whether monetary incentives are an effective tool for increasing domestic waste sorting. We exploit the exogenous variation in the waste management policies experienced during the years 1999-2008 by the 95 municipalities in the district of Treviso (Italy). We estimate with a...

The notion of choice inconsistency is widely spread in the literature on behavioral economics. Several approaches were used to account for the observation that people reverse their choices over time. This paper aims to explain the formation of resolutions regarded as internal self-binding...

Economists have been theorizing that other-regarding preferences influence decision making. Yet, what are the corresponding psychological mechanisms that inform these preferences in laboratory games? Empathy and Theory of Mind (ToM) are dispositions considered to be essential in social...

The satisficing approach is generalized and applied to finite n-person games. Based on direct elicitation of aspirations, we formally define the concept of satisficing, which does not exclude (prior-free) optimality but includes it as a border case. We also review some experiments on strategic...

Theoretically and experimentally, we generalize the analysis of acquiring a company (Samuelson and Bazerman 1985) by allowing for competition of both, buyers and sellers. Naivety of both is related to the idea that higher prices exclude worse qualities. While competition of naive buyers...

In economic theory, utility depends on past, present and future outcomes. The experiment described in this paper suggests that utility also depends on people's attitudes, and that it can easily be manipulated through these attitudes. The results imply, ?rst, that purely outcome-based models of...

Using a laboratory experiment, we examine whether informal monetary sanctions can lead to better coordination in a repeated minimum effort coordination game. While most groups first experience inefficient coordination, the efficiency increases substantially after introducing an ex post...

We argue that entrepreneurial choice proceeds in at least in two steps, with vocational choice nearly always preceding choice of employment status, whether that be self-employment or dependent employment. Since the two decisions are interrelated, analysis of entrepreneurial choice as a single...

We test the implications of ambiguity aversion in a principal-agent problem with multiple agents. When output distributions are uncertain, models of ambiguity aversion suggest that tournaments may become more attractive than independent wage contracts, in contrast to the case where output...