We show that a steeply increasing workload before a deadline is compatible with time-consistent preferences. The key departure from the literature is that we consider a stochastic environment where success of effort is not guaranteed

Rapid technological developments in online markets fundamentally change the relationship between consumers and sellers. Online platforms can now easily gather data about the consumer and his search behavior, that allow for price discrimination. Therefore the consumers' product search becomes a...

Evidence from an experiment investigating the "house money effect" in the context of a public goods game is reconsidered. Analysis is performed within the framework of the panel hurdle model, in which subjects are assumed to be one of two types: free-riders, and potential contributors. The...

In major legal orders such as UK, the U.S., Germany, and France, bribers and recipients face equally severe criminal sanctions. In contrast, countries like China, Russia, and Japan treat the briber more mildly. Given these differences between symmetric and asymmetric punishment regimes for...

Bracketing is a mental procedure about how people deal with multiple tasks. If a decision maker handles all the tasks at the same time, it is called broad bracketing. If she handles the tasks separately, e.g., one or a few tasks each time, it is called narrow bracketing. This paper...

This article is concerned with the welfare properties of trade when the behavior of agents cannot be rationalized by preferences. I investigate this question in an environment of matching allocation problems. There are two reasons for doing so: firstly, the finiteness of such problems entails...

In a randomized field experiment, we investigate the connection between work goals, monetary incentives, and work performance. Employees are observed in a natural work environment where they have to do a simple, but effort-intense task. Output is perfectly observable and workers are paid for...

Sanctions are often so weak that a money maximizing individual would not be deterred. In this paper I show that they may nonetheless serve a forward looking purpose if sufficiently many individuals are averse against advantageous inequity. Using the Fehr/Schmidt model (QJE 1999) I define three...

For a rational choice theorist, the absence of crime is more difficult to explain than its presence. Arguably, the expected value of criminal sanctions, i.e. the product of severity times certainty, is often below the expected benefit. We rely on a standard theory from behavioral economics,...

This paper experimentally investigates the nature of impulses in impulse learning. Particularly, we analyze whether positive feedback (i.e., yielding a superior payo in a game) or negative feedback (i.e., yielding an inferior payo in a game) leads to a systematic change in the individual...