One of the long-standing puzzles in economics is why wages do not fall sufficiently in recessions so as to avoid increases in unemployment. Put differently, if the competitive market wage declines, why don't employers simply force their employees to accept lower wages as well? As an alternative...

The endowment effect describes the fact that people demand much more to give up an object than they are willing to spend to acquire it. The existence of this effect has been documented in numerous experiments. We attempt to explain this effect by showing that evolution favors individuals whose...

In 2001, the Fed has lowered interest rates in a series of cuts, starting from 6.5 % at the end of 2000 to 2.0 % by early November. This paper asks, whether the Federal Reserve Bank has been surprising the markets, taking as given the conventional view about the effect of monetary policy shocks....

Newspapers and weekly magazines catering to the investing crowd often rank funds according to the returns generated in the past. Aside from satisfying sheer curiosity, these numbers are probably also the basis on which investors pick a fund to invest in. In this article, we fully characterize...

This paper investigates the behaviour in repeated decision situations. The experimental study shows that subjects show low or no risk-aversion, but put very high value on the opportunity to sell the lottery in every stage of the decision problem. There is evidence that risk attitudes depend on...

Direct reciprocity means to respond in kind to another person whereas indirect reciprocity is understood here as rewarding someone else. We perform corresponding experiments which use a similar underlying structure as the reciprocity experiment of Berg, Dickhaut, and McCabe (1995). Another...

We study behavior in experimental beauty contests with, first, boundary and interior equilibria, and, second, homogeneous and heterogenous types of players. We find quicker and better convergence to the game-theoretic equilibrium with interior equilibria and homogeneous players.