We consider repeated trust game experiments to study the interplay between explicit and relational incentives. After having gained experience with two payoff variations of the trust game, subjects in the final part explicitly choose which of these two variants to play. Theory predicts that...

Numerous gift-exchange experiments have found a positive wage–effort relationship. In (almost) all these experiments the employer both owns and controls the firm. This paper explores to what extent the separation of ownership and control affects the wage–effort relationship. We compare the...

By incorporating reciprocity in an otherwise standard principal–agent model, I investigate the relation between monetary gift-exchange and incentive pay, while allowing for worker heterogeneity. I assume that some, but not all, workers care more for their principal when they are convinced that...

From the regulation of sports to lawmaking in parliament, in many situations one group of people (“agents”) make decisions that affect the payoffs of others (“principals”) who may offer action-contingent transfers in order to sway the agents' decisions. Prat and Rustichini (2003)...

Expert advice is often biased in ways that benefit the advisor. We demonstrate how self-deception helps advisors be biased while preserving their self-image as ethical and identify limits to advisors' ability to self-deceive. In experiments where advisors recommend one of two investments to a...

Rule learning posits that decision makers, rather than choosing over actions, choose over behavioral rules with different levels of sophistication. Rules are reinforced over time based on their historically observed payoffs in a given game. Past works on rule learning have shown that when...

In the presence of self-interested parties, mechanism designers typically aim to implement some social-choice function in an equilibrium. This paper studies the cost of such equilibrium requirements in terms of communication. While a certain amount of information x needs to be communicated just...

A growing literature analyzes revenue-maximizing contracts for situations in which agents can acquire private information before they decide whether to join the contract. It is conjectured that the results also apply to the more natural scenario where information can be acquired either before or...

We study auctions under restricted communication. Agents have valuations distributed over an interval but can only report one of a finite number of messages. We provide necessary conditions for welfare as well as revenue maximizing auctions in the independent private values case when bidders...

We consider an oligopolistic market where firms compete in price and quality and where consumers have heterogeneous information: some consumers know both the prices, and quality of the products offered, some know only the prices, and some know neither. We show that if there are sufficiently many...