Contests are meant to attract the best performers and incentivize high effort, however, they may also attract cheaters who try to win via illicit means which crowds out the best performers. We use a laboratory experiment to explore the role of self-selection in contests with a possibility of...

Ostracism, or exclusion by peers, has been practiced since ancient times as a severe form of punishment against transgressors of laws or social norms. The purpose of this paper is to offer a comprehensive analysis on how ostracism affects behavior and the functioning of a social group. We...

In this paper we experimentally test skewness preferences at the individual level. Several prospects that can be ordered with respect to the third-degree stochastic dominance (3SD) criterion are ranked by the participants of the experiment. We find that the skewness of a distribution has a...

Despite extensive studies, the nature of risk attitudes remains a vigorously discussed question in economics and psychology. In expected utility theory, attitudes towards risk originate from changes in marginal utility. Cumulative prospect theory (CPT) adds an additional dimension: the weighting...

We study risk attitudes, ambiguity attitudes, and time preferences of 661 children and adolescents, aged ten to eighteen years, in an incentivized experiment. We relate experimental choices to field behavior. Experimental measures of impatience are found to be significant redictors of health...

Time preferences drive decisions in many economic situations, such as investment contexts or salary negotiations. These situations are characterized by a very short time frame for decision making. Preferences are potentially susceptible to the confounding effects of time pressure, as proposed by...

Risk-assessment and risk-taking in various forms are among the most important tasks financial professionals face in their daily work. A large body of experimental studies has shown a substantial effect of the decision domain (gain vs loss domain) on risk-taking, predominantly among students. In...

With the rise of experimental research in the social sciences, numerous methods to elicit and classify people's risk attitudes in the laboratory have evolved. However, evidence suggests that people's attitudes towards risk may change considerably when measured with different methods. Based on a...

Previous work has shown that unobservable random shocks on output have a detrimental effect on effort provision in short-term ('static') employment relationships. Given the prevalence of long-term ('dynamic') relationships in firms, we investigate whether the impact of shocks is similarly...

Risk-taking may depend on whether risks result from an action (active risk-taking) or from not taking action (passive risk-taking). We develop a new experimental risk-elicitation procedure, the Dynamic Lottery Adjustment Task, and employ it across two separate experiments to study the size and...