In seiner Thünen-Vorlesung vor dem Verein für Socialpolitik im Herbst 2020 hat Klaus Schmidt das Design von Klimaschutzverhandlungen untersucht. Er geht dabei von einem Vorschlag Martin Weitzmans aus, künftige Verhandlungen auf einen einheitlichen CO2-Mindestpreis zu fokussieren. Wäre ein...

Weitzman (2014) proposed that focusing international climate negotiations on a uniform carbon price is more effective than Paris style negotiations in achieving ambitious climate action. We put this hypothesis to an experimental test by simulating international negotiations on climate change in...

International cooperation on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, disarmament, or free trade needs to be negotiated. The success of such negotiations depends on how they are designed. In the context of international climate change policy, it has been proposed [e.g., Weitzman J of the...

Open access (OA) publishing upends the traditional business model in scientific publishing by requiring authors instead of readers to pay for the publishing-related costs. In this paper, we aim to elicit the willingness to pay (WTP) of authors for open access publishing. We conduct two separate...

It is widely believed that an environmental tax (price regulation) and cap-and-trade (quantity regulation) are equally efficient in controlling pollution when there is no uncertainty. We show that this is not the case if some consumers (firms, local governments) are morally concerned about...

Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström were awarded the 2016 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for their fundamental contributions to contract theory. This article offers a short summary and discussion of their path breaking work.

We report on two experiments that identify non-monetary incentive effects of competition. As the number of competitors increases, monetary incentives to engage in cost reduction tend to decrease. We test the hypothesis that there are non-monetary incentive effects of competition going in the...

In business and politics, gifts are often aimed at influencing the recipient at the expense of third parties. In an experimental study, which removes informational and incentive confounds, subjects strongly respond to small gifts even though they understand the gift giver’s intention. Our...

Pay What You Want (PWYW) and Name Your Own Price (NYOP) are customer driven pricing mechanisms that give customers (some) pricing power. Both have been used in service industries with high fixed costs to price discriminate without setting a reference price. Their participatory and innovative...

We analyze "Pay What You Want" as a business model for Open Access publishing by discussing motives leading authors to make voluntary contributions, potential benefits for publishers and present results from a field experiment at one publisher. Data from the field experiment indicate authors'...