Women are often less willing than men to compete, even in tasks where there is no gender gap in performance. Also, many people experience competitive contexts as stressful and previous research has documented that men and women sometimes react differently to acute stressors. We use two...

We conduct an experiment to test whether the size of a loss and the time in a losing position affect investors’ adaptation to the loss situation and, subsequently, whether this adaptation affects future investment decisions. As investors adapt to losses, their neutral reference point shifts...

Empirical evidence supports the conventional wisdom that entrepreneurs are more optimistic and overconfident than others. However, the same holds true for top managers. In this lab-in-the-field experiment we directly compare the scores of entrepreneurs, managers and employees on a comprehensive...

Most evidence of hyperbolic discounting is based on violations of either stationarity or time consistency as observed in choice experiments. These choice reversals may however also result from time-varying discount rates. Hyperbolic discounting is a plausible explanation for choice reversals...

We study experimentally whether the endowment effect survives in a social and strategic context. Participants are asked for their Willingness-to-Accept (WTA) or Willingness-to-Pay (WTP) to play a series of 2x2 games. In the second part of the experiment, we study the endowment effect in...

Under relative performance pay, other-regarding workers internalize the negative externality they impose on other workers. In one form -increased own effort reduces others' payoffs- this results in other-regarding individuals depressing efforts. In another form punishment reduces the payoff of...

Comparative payment schemes and tournament-style promotion mechanisms are ubiquitous in the work place. We test experimentally whether they have a negative impact on the willingness to cooperate. Participants first perform in a simple task and then participate in a public goods game. The payment...