People can become less cooperative when threatened with sanctions, and researchers have pointed to both 'intentions' and incentives as sources of this effect. This paper reports data from a novel experimental design aimed at determining the relative importance of intentions and incentives in...

Time-consuming and costly religious rituals pose a puzzle for economists committed to rational choice theories of human behavior. We propose that religious rituals promote in-group trust and cooperation that help to overcome collective-action problems. We test this hypothesis on communal...

We present an experimental study on the wasted resources associated with tax evasion. This waste arises from taxpayers and tax authorities investing costly effort in the concealment and detection of tax evasion. We show that these socially inefficient efforts - as well as the frequency of tax...

Over the last two years a research field has developed under the banner of 'neuroeconomics' in which recent neuroscientific methods are deploid to analyze economically relevant processes. This paper aims to provide an overview of the methodology and current state of neuroeconomic research by...

Location of product origin is an often-used marketing device by retailers. This approach is based on the assumption that location of origin signals something to consumers about the underlying quality (or other attributes) of the product. This can be an effective strategy if the signal matches...

A number of recent theoretical papers have shown that for buyer-size discounts to emerge in a bargaining model, the total surplus function over which parties bargain must have certain nonlinearities. We test the theory in an experimental setting in which a seller bargains with a number of buyers...

Small and medium sized enterprises (KOBIs in Turkish) make up about 98 percent of all manufacturing firms in Turkey. They make a significant contribution to the economy in terms of output, employment, value-added and economic growth. Unfortunately, there seems to be many obstacles restraining...

In many research contexts it is necessary to group experimental subjects into behavioral “types.” Usually, this is done by pre-specifying a set of candidate decision-making heuristics and then assigning each subject to the heuristic that best describes his/her behavior. Such approaches might...

We present a preliminary overview of a political stock market experiment we have conducted at the Universitaet Passau. This experiment differs from previous work (e.g. the renowned Iowa Electronic Markets) in that it is built on the call market institution rather than on double auction...