In intergroup contests a manager advises and motivates her group’s members. Her rewards often depend on the subsequent contest expenditure of the members. I test whether such incentives undermine the credibility and effectiveness of a manager’s efforts. In the different experimental...

We study the effects of random assignment to coeducational and single-sex classes on the academic performance of female high school students. Our estimation results show that single-sex schooling improves the performance of female students in mathematics. This positive effect increases if the...

This paper uses experimental data to analyze how competitive behavior is influenced by coaching and peer observation. We study behavior in a sequential contest, considering information about the effort level of subjects in other contests (observation of peers) and information about the...

Social preferences explain competitive behavior between agents and reciprocity towards a principal but there is no insight into the interaction of competition and reciprocity. We conducted a laboratory experiment with two treatments to address this issue. In a conventional tournament, an agent...

This paper introduces and discusses an idea which minimizes gaming or manipulation activities, if payments are linked to results from manipulative methods. The idea is to add nonmanipulable information to manipulable information to improve the evaluation of a given output. A score declining in...

We present results from a field experiment at Swiss high schools in which we compare the effectiveness of a classroom experiment against conventional economics teaching. We randomly assigned classes into different teaching environments or a control group. Our results suggest that both teaching...

People do not like to delegate the distribution of favors. To explain this reluctance we disentangle reward motives in an experiment, in which an investor can directly transfer money to a trustee or delegate this decision to another investor. Varying the transfer values of investor and delegate,...

We present results from a field experiments at Swiss high schools in which we compare the effectiveness of teaching methods in economics. We randomly assigned classes into an experimental and a conventional teaching group, or a control group that received no specific instruction. Both of our...

We provide experimental evidence on how unequal access to performance enhancing education affects demand for redistribution. People earn money in a real effort experiment and can then decide how to distribute it among themselves and another subjects. We compare situations in which randomly...

Machiavelli advises against delegating the distribution of favors. We test this claim in an experiment, in which an investor can directly transfer money to a trustee or delegate this decision to another investor. Varying the value of the transfers of the investor and the delegate, we find that...