Economic engineering is the science of designing real-world institutions and mechanisms that align individual incentives and behavior with the underlying goals. This paper discusses why behavioral economic engineering is a promising research field, how behavioral phenomena may affect economic...

Motivated by recent research on survey data, we test the influence of the political regime on social norms under controlled laboratory conditions. Comparing solidarity behavior revealed by East and West Germans in 1995 and 2009, we find that East Germans persistently show much less solidarity...

Using data from laboratory experiments, we find that East Germans show consistently less solidarity than West Germans; there has been no convergence in the 20years after the reunification. While it has recently been estimated that political values converge 20 to 40years after the reunification...

The advent of laboratory experiments in economics over the last few decades has produced an enormous literature devoted to describing, testing and modeling economic and social behavior. Measured by publications and citations, the development of social preference models to capture decisions...