Agents' decisions to exert effort depends on the provided incentives as well as the potential costs for doing so. So far most of the attention has been on the incentive side. However, our lab experiments underline that both the incentive and cost side can be used separately to shape work...

In this paper, we discuss recent evidence from economic experiments that study the impact of social preferences on workplace behavior. We focus on situations in which a single employer interacts with multiple employees. Traditionally, equity and efficiency have been seen as opposing aims in such...

In this study we use import penetration as a proxy for foreign competition in order to empirically analyze (1) the impact of foreign competition on managerial compensation, (2) differences in the impact between Germany and the U.S and (3) whether the impact of import penetration is driven by...

To test and replicate the superstar effect reported by Brown (2011) we empirically study contests where a single entrant has an endogenously higher probability of winning. Unlike the previous literature, we test for the presence of the superstar effect in several different contexts. Ultimately,...

In a real-effort experiment, we investigate how the timing of discretionary bonuses affects the relationship between workers and managers. Average output is substantially higher if bonuses are paid in the middle rather than upfront or at the end, as workers increase first-period output to signal...