In a fundraising field experiment we show that individuals are not only conditionally cooperative, but that they are also more prone to donate to a homeless individual when the previous donor has a higher social status. We trailed a homeless person asking for donations within Cologne's metro...

We investigate whether and how an individuals' propensity to lie is affected by the social relationship between a potential liar and her/his possible victim. We argue that a shared social identity of sender and receiver increases sender's aversion to lie by raising two types of costs: the...

People do not only feel guilt from not living up to others' expectations (Battigalli and Dufwenberg (2007)), but may also like to exceed them. We propose a model that generalizes the guilt aversion model to capture the possibility of positive surprises when making gifts. A model extension allows...

We conduct a field experiment in a naturally occurring labor environment and track whether the performance of workers responds to unexpected wage increases. Specifically, we investigate how the timing of wage increases affects efforts. We find that workers’ performance is about 11% higher for...

We present projections of winter storm-induced insured losses in the German residential building sector for the 21st century. With this aim, two structurally most independent downscaling methods and one hybrid downscaling method are applied to a 3-member ensemble of ECHAM5/MPI-OM1 A1B scenario...

We study the role of transparency in a novel three-person profit sharing game in which managers and board directors decide on how to distribute the revenues of a company among themselves and shareholders, who are the residual claimants of the companies revenues. We examine two hypotheses. One is...

We conduct a field experiment in a naturally occurring labor environment and track whether the performance of workers responds to unexpected wage increases. Specifically, we investigate how the timing of wage increases affects efforts. We find that workers’ performance is substantially higher...

Without transparency about peer wages in a real effort experiment, a change of wages does not affect performance. With transparency, however, higher paid workers tend to work more accurately, and lower paid workers shirk more under piece rates.