We ran a field experiment to investigate whether nudge policies, consisting in behavioural insight messaging, help to improve performance in financial trading. Our experiment involved students enrolled in a financial trading course in an Italian University who were invited to trade on Borsa...

We study in an online, real-effort experiment how the bracketing of non-binding goals affects performance in a work-leisure self-control problem. We externally induce the goal bracket – daily goals or a weekly goal – and within that bracket let subjects set goals for how much they want to...

We document that an internal locus of control can be hindering in financial market situations, where short-term outcomes are determined by chance. The reason is that internally controlled individuals may tend to (over-)react to random outcomes. Our evidence is based on an experiment in which...

About 15 years ago, economic experiments with children and adolescents were considered as an extravagant niche of economic research. Since then, this type of research hasexploded in scope and depth. It has become clear that studying the development of economic behavior and its determinants is...

We provide a tractable model of motivational goal bracketing by a present-biased individual, extending previous work to show that the main insights from models with rational goals carry over to a setting with non-rational goals. Goals motivate because they serve as reference points that make...

Whereas economists have made extensive studies of the impact of levels of incentives on behavior, they have paid little attention to the effects of regularity and frequency of incentives. We contrasted three ways of rewarding participants in a real-effort experiment in which individuals had to...

Employers structure pay and employment relationships to mitigate agency problems. A large literature in economics documents how the resolution of these problems shapes personnel policies and labor markets. For the most part, the study of agency in employment relationships relies on highly...

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...