The paper analyzes the role of the structure of communication - i.e. who is talking with whom - on the choice of messages, on their credibility and on actual play. We run an experiment in a three-player coordination game with Pareto ranked equilibria, where a pair of agents has a profitable...

In order to address the impact of regulation on ethical concerns of consumers, we study the effect of a minimum wage. In our experimental market, consumers have monopsony power, firms engage in Bertrand competition, and workers are passive recipients of a wage payment. Two treatments are...

The higher our aspirations, the higher the probability that we have to adjust them downwards when forming more realistic expectations later on. This paper shows that the costs induced by high aspirations are not trivial. We first develop a theoretical framework to identify the factors that...

Does gender play a role in the context of team work? Our results based on a real-effort experiment suggest that performance depends on the composition of the team. We find that female and male performance differ most in mixed teams with revenue sharing between the team members, as men put in...

We study experimentally the effect of bargaining power in sequential trading mechanisms that offer the possibility to trade at a fixed price before an auction. In the "Buy-It-Now" format, the seller offers a price prior to the auction; whereas in the "Sell-It-No" format, it is the buyer. Both...

With the help of a simple model, we show that the hindsight bias can lead to ineffcient delegation decisions. This prediction is tested experimentally. In an online experiment that was conducted during the FIFA World Cup 2010 participants were asked to predict a number of outcomes of the ongoing...

We study the voluntary revelation of private, personal information in a labor-market experiment with a lemons structure where workers can reveal their productivity at a cost. While rational revelation improves a worker's payo , it imposes a negative externality on others and may trigger further...

We investigate how stable individuals’ risk attitudes are with respect to changes in cognitive load. In a laboratory experiment using pairwise lottery choice and a within-subject design, we showthat putting subjects under load via a concurrent working-memory task significantly increases their...

Interactions between players with private information and opposed interests are often prone to bad advice and inefficient outcomes, e.g. markets for financial or health care services. In a deception game we investigate experimentally which factors could improve advice quality. Besides advisor...

An advisor is supposed to recommend a financial product in the best interest of her client. However, the best product for the client may not always be the product yielding the highest commission to the advisor. Do advisors nevertheless provide truthful advice? If not, will a voluntary or...