We document experimentally how biased self-assessments affect the outcome of matching markets. In the experiments, we exogenously manipulate the self-confidence of participants regarding their relative performance by employing hard and easy real-effort tasks. We give participants the option to...

Although market-based environmental policy instruments feature prominently in economic theory and are widely employed, they often meet with public resistance. We argue that such resistance may be driven by a feeling of moral responsibility where citizens prefer to tackle environmental problems...

We investigate gender discrimination and its variation between firms, occupations, and industries with a factorial survey design (vignette study) for a large sample of German firms. Short CVs of fictitious applicants are presented to human resource managers who indicate the likelihood of the...

We investigate the effect of spells of no formal employment of young Germans on their chances of entering the labor market. We also study whether the potential negative effects of such spells can be mitigated by publicly provided training measures. In a field experiment, fictitious applications...

We measure willingness to pay for privacy in a field experiment. Participants were given the choice to buy a maximum of one DVD from one of two online stores. One store consistently required more sensitive personal data than the other, but otherwise the stores were identical. In one treatment,...

Seit Jahren hat das dezentrale System der Hochschulzulassung in Deutschland aufgrund von Mehrfachzulassungen bis lange nach Semesterbeginn mit dem Problem unbesetzter Studienplätze zu kämpfen eines der typischen Probleme dezentraler Zuordnungsverfahren. Langwierige Nachrückverfahren...

Quotas for special groups of students often apply in school or university admission procedures. This paper studies the performance of two mechanisms to implement such quotas in a lab experiment. The first mechanism is a simplified version of the mechanism currently employed by the German central...

This contribution provides a brief overview and discussion of the role of experiments in economics. It is argued that economic experiments have convinced economists and the public of the existence of phenomena that have been outside the scope of economics. The success of these experiments is...

We study beliefs and choices in a repeated normal-form game. In addition to a baseline treatment with common knowledge of the game structure, feedback about choices in the previous period and random matching, we run treatments (i) with fixed matching, (ii) without information about the...

Ambition as the desire for personal achievement is an important driver of behavior. Using laboratory experiments, we study the role of social influence on ambition in two distinct domains of achievement, namely performance goals and task complexity. In the first case, participants set themselves...