We conduct an artefactual field experiment to examine various spillover effects of Affirmative Action policies in the context of castes in India. We test a) if individuals who compete in the presence of Affirmative Action policies remain competitive in the same proportion after the policy has...

We propose a novel approach to modelling time preferences, based on a cognitive shortcoming of human decision makers: the perception of future events becomes increasingly ?blurred? as the events are pushed further in time. We axiomatise a class of preference representations which can be...

Male and female choices differ in many economic situations, e.g., on the labor market. This paper considers whether such differences are driven by different attitudes towards competition. In our experiment subjects choose between a tournament and a piece-rate pay scheme before performing a real...

In this paper I address theoretically and assess empirically the effect of impatience on workers' on-the-job behavior. Theoretically, short-run impatience explains several empirical regularities concerning job mobility and account for different on-the-job behaviors. On-the-job search on one hand...

This paper experimentally investigates the impact of different pay and relative performance information policies on employee effort. We explore three information policies: No feedback about relative performance, feedback given halfway through the production period, and continuously updated...

Goals are an important source of motivation. But little is known about why and how people set them. We address these questions in a model based on two stylized facts from psychology and behavioral economics: i) Goals serve as reference points for performance. ii) Present-biased preferences...

Self-administered rewards are ubiquitous. They serve as incentives for personal accomplishments and are widely recommended as tools for overcoming self-control problems. However, it seems puzzling why self-rewards can work: the prospect of a reward has a motivating force only if the threat of...

It is a puzzle why people often evaluate consequences of choices separately (narrow bracketing) rather than jointly (broad bracketing). We study the hypothesis that a present-biased individual, who faces two tasks, may bracket his goals narrowly for motivational reasons. Goals motivate because...

Previous migration facilitates future population moves, a phenomenon called network migration. However, thus far, network migration has been closely linked to network externalities. In contrast, this paper argues that the incumbent migration population can actively impact on future migration...