Neutral framing is a standard tool of experimental economics. However, overly neutral instructions, which lack any contextual clues, can lead to strange behavior. In a contextless second price auction for a meaningless good, a majority of subjects enter positive bids - a case of cognitive...

Teams, in both firms and in sports, jointly produce a product. While a fixed task is assigned to each member of a team, the individual team productivity of a worker or player is difficult to conceptualize. This is particularly true, if this concept is aimed to be operable on observable data. In...