Economic research shows that candidates have a higher chance of getting (re-)elected when they have the luck that the world economy does well even though this is beyond their control and unrelated to their competence. Psychological research demonstrates that candidates increase their chances if...

Do employees benefit from worker representation on corporate boards? Economists and policymakers are keenly interested in this question – especially lately, as worker representation is widely promoted as an important way to ensure the interests and views of the workers. To investigate this...

The mathematical framework of psychological game theory is useful for describing many forms of motivation where preferences depend directly on own or others’ beliefs. It allows for incorporating, e.g., emotions, reciprocity, image concerns, and self-esteem in economic analysis. We explain how...

To discuss experimental results without discussing how they came about makes sense when the results are robust to the way experiments are conducted. Experimental results, however, are - arguably more often than not - sensitive to numerous design and implementation characteristics such as the use...

Duverger (1954) noted that changes in electoral systems will have two types of effects: mechanical effects, and reactions of political agents in anticipation of these, which he referred to as psychological effects. It is complicated to empirically separate the two effects since these occur...

We propose a model of optimal decision making subject to a memory constraint. The constraint is a limit on the complexity of memory measured using Shannon's mutual information, as in models of rational inattention; but our theory differs from that of Sims (2003) in not assuming costless memory...

The subject of this paper is how the epistemic limitations of individuals and their biases in reasoning affect collective decisions and in particular the functioning of democracies. In fact, while the cognitive sciences have largely shown how the imperfections of human rationality shape...

This paper studies how imposing norms on contribution behavior affects individuals' intrinsic motivation. We consider the church levy, which the Catholic Church in Germany collects as a charitable donation, despite the fact that the levy is legally a tax. We design a randomized field experiment...

During the last two decades economists have made much progress in understanding incentives, contracts and organisations. Yet, they constrained their attention to a very narrow and empirically questionable view of human motivation. The purpose of this paper is to show that this narrow view of...