This paper studies the dynamics of human mobility during the initial stage of the COVID-19 pandemic in countries around the world. The main goal of the analysis is to empirically separate voluntary reductions in mobility driven by the information about the location-specific pandemic trends from...

Incentive schemes affect performance and priorities of agents but, in reality, they can be complicated even for simple tasks. We analyze the effects of the salience of incentives in a team production setting where the principal has an interest in quantity and quality of output. We use data from...

Contrary to previous literature we hypothesize that labor's interest may well – like that of shareholders – aim at securing the long-run survival of the firm. Consequently, employee representatives on the supervisory board could well have an interest in increasing incentive-based...

We introduce and study the problem of manipulation of choice behavior. In a class of two-stage models of decision making, with the agent's choices determined by three "psychological variables," we imagine that a subset of these variables can be selected by a "manipulator." To what extent does...

This paper studies the assignment of decision makers to two committees that make decisions by a simple majority rule. There is an even number of decision makers at each of various skill levels and each committee has an odd number of members. Surprisingly, even with the symmetric assumptions in...

This paper introduces new experimental designs to enrich understanding of conditional cooperation and punishment in public good games. The key to these methods is to elicit complete contribution or punishment profiles using the strategy method. It is found that the selfish bias in conditional...

The form of contests for a single fixed prize can be determined by a designer who maximizes the contestants' efforts. This paper establishes that, under common knowledge of the two asymmetric contestants' prize valuations, a fair Tullock-type endogenously determined lottery is always superior to...

This paper presents a new model of interest groups and policy formation in the legislature. In our setting, the already given party ideological predispositions and power distribution determine the expected policy outcome. Our analysis applies to the case of un-enforced or enforced party...

Do drivers reduce speeds when gasoline prices are high? Previous research investigating this energy conservation hypothesis produced mixed results. We take a fresh look at the data and estimate a significant negative relationship between speeding and gasoline prices. This presents a new...

We examine spending on consumption items which have signaling value in social interactions across groups with distinctive social identities in India, where social identities are defined by caste and religious affiliations. The classification of such items was done by eliciting responses to a...