We study theoretically and experimentally the role of fatigue and recovery within a competitive work environment. At work, agents usually make their effort choice in response to competition and monetary incentives. At the same time, they have to take into account fatigue, which accumulates over...

Ambition as the desire for personal achievement is an important driver of behavior. Using laboratory experiments, we study the role of social influence on ambition in two distinct domains of achievement, namely performance goals and task complexity. In the first case, participants set themselves...

Social media are becoming increasingly important in our society and change the way people communicate, how they acquire information, and how they form beliefs. Experts are concerned that the rise of social media may make interaction and information exchange among like-minded individuals more...

This paper explores the optimal provision of dynamic incentives for employees with reciprocal preferences. Building on the presumption that a relational contract can establish a norm of reciprocity, I show that generous upfront wages that activate an employee’s reciprocal preferences are more...

If agents are exposed to continual competitive pressure, how does a short-term variation of the severity of the competition affect agents' performance? In a real-effort laboratory experiment, we study a one-time increase in incentives in a sequence of equally incentivized contests. Our results...

We conduct a field experiment where we vary both the presence of a gift-exchange wage and the effect of the worker's effort on the manager's payoff. Results indicate a strong complementarity between the initial wage-gift and the agent's ability to "repay the gift". We control for differences in...

We analyze both theoretically and empirically how monetary incentives and information about others’ behavior affect dishonesty. We run a laboratory experiment with 560 participants, each of whom observes a number from one to six with there being a payoff associated with each number. They can...

This paper investigates whether limited liability affects risk-taking through motivated beliefs. To do so, we run a within-subject experiment in which subjects invest in a risky asset under full or limited liability. In both cases, before the investment is made, subjects observe a noisy signal...

In this paper we study the effects that loss contracts - prepayments that can be clawbacked later - have on group coordination when there is strategic uncertainty. We compare the choices made by experimental subjects in a minimum effort game. In control sessions, incentives are formulated as a...