Our laboratory study of risk sharing without commitment captures the main features of a simple model of voluntary insurance. Participants are paired in matches with stochastic endings. Each period they receive fixed endowments and one of the pair (randomly-drawn) also receives an additional...

We study how two dimensions of market conditions affect behaviour in experimental gift-exchange markets with repeated interaction. First, we consider the impact of competitive imbalance, by varying whether there is an excess supply of "firms" or an excess supply of "workers" in the market....

Do people care about intentions - even when good intentions do not produce good results? In our experiments we find that rates of punishment and reward react strongly to intentions (the wage a firm decides to pay) and more modestly to distributional outcomes (the higher or lower wage actually...

We study the impact of reputational incentives in markets characterised by moral hazard problems. Social preferences have been shown to enhance contract enforcement in these markets, while at the same time generating considerable wage and price rigidity. Reputation powerfully amplifies the...

In this paper, the authors report the results of a series of efficiency wage experiments. Some of the key predictions of the efficiency wage hypothesis are qualitatively confirmed by the data: higher wages caused a reduction in shirking; firms offered contracts which exhibited positive job...

A substantial number of people exhibit social preferences, which means they are not solely motivated by material self-interest but also care positively or negatively for the material payoffs of relevant reference agents. We show empirically that economists fail to understand fundamental economic...

The exercise of insider power is frequently considered as a major cause of involuntary unemployment. The authors show that under standard assumptions--insiders are selfish and they need not fear the loss of their job--insider power does not cause unemployment but leads to the introduction of a...

We report on several experiments on the optimal allocation of ownership rights. The experiments confirm the property rights approach by showing that the ownership structure affects relationship-specific investments and that subjects attain the most efficient ownership allocation despite starting...