Credence goods markets – like for health care or repair services – with their informational asymmetries between sellers and customers are prone to fraudulent behavior of sellers and resulting market inefficiencies. We present the first model that considers both diagnostic uncertainty of...

Credence goods markets – like for health care or repair services – with their informational asymmetries between sellers and customers are prone to fraudulent behavior of sellers and resulting market inefficiencies. We present the first model that considers both diagnostic uncertainty of...

Discrimination is an ubiquitous phenomenon in many societies, but little is known about its origins in childhood. In a framed field experiment, we let 142 three to six-year old preschool children allocate a fixed endowment between an in-group and an out-group receiver in two domains (gender and...

We present experimental evidence from a bilingual city in Northern Italy on whether thelanguage spoken by a partner in a prisoner’s dilemma game affects behavior and leadsto discrimination. Running a framed field experiment with 828 six- to eleven-year oldprimary school children in the city of...

We measure time preferences in a sample of 561 children aged seven to eleven years. Using awithin-subject design we compare the behavior of our subjects in two distinct experimentaltasks: a standard choice list with multiple decisions and a simpler time-investment-exerciserequiring one decision...

According to Chen’s (2013) linguistic-savings hypothesis, languages which grammatically separate the future and the present (like English or Italian) induce less future-oriented behavior than languages in which speakers can refer to the future by using present tense (like German). We...

We study with a sample of 1,070 primary school children, aged seven to eleven years,how altruism in a donation experiment is related to children’s risk attitudes and intertemporalchoices. Examining such a relationship is motivated by theories of reciprocalaltruism that provide a cornerstone to...

The effectiveness of social interaction depends strongly on an ability to coordinate actions efficiently. In large networks, such coordination may be very difficult to achieve and may depend on the communication technology and the network structure. We examine how pre-play communication and...

Many important intertemporal decisions, such as investments of firms or households, are made by groups rather than individuals. Little is known what happens to such collective decisions when group members have different incentives for waiting, because the economics literature on group decision...

We study gender differences in relation to performance and sabotage in competitions. While we find no systematic gender differences in performance in the real effort task, we observe a strong gender gap in sabotage choices in our experiment. This gap is rooted in the uncertainty about the...