This paper investigates in a principal–agent environment whether and how group membership influences the effectiveness of incentives and when incentives can have “hidden costs”, i.e., a detrimental effect. We show experimentally that in all interactions control mechanisms can have hidden...

A number of papers have suggested that pro-social behaviour in the workplace may be sensitive to the institutional environment, but there is little empirical research that attempts to test this directly using data on worker behaviour. This is the aim of this paper. We show that individuals in...

The development of knowledge requires investment, which may be made in terms of financial resources or time. Open source software (OSS) has challenged much of the traditional reasoning by suggesting that individuals behave altruistically and contribute to a public good, despite the opportunity...

We compare the effects of and the motivations behind voluntary punishment and reward in a finitely repeated public goods game. Our experimental results show that (1) the level of cooperation is indistinguishable between the punishment and reward treatments when group membership does not change,...

Bezugsgenossenschaften weisen durch das Verhältnis zu ihren Eigentümern, welche gleichzeitig Kunden des Unternehmens sind, erhebliche Unterschiede zu anderen Unternehmenstypen auf. Eine Entlohnung der genossenschaftlichen Unternehmensleitung sollte diese Besonderheit berücksichtigen. Dieser...