In April 2003 the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission proposed a complicated marketdesign – the Wholesale Power Market Platform (WPMP) – for common adoption byall U.S. wholesale power markets. Versions of the WPMP have been implemented in NewEngland, New York, the mid-Atlantic states,...

We conduct a framed field experiment with 245 employed persons (no students) as subjectsand a real tax, which is levied on the subjects’ income from working in our real effort task. Inour first three treatments, the net wage is constant but gross wages are subject to differentconstant marginal...

Es gibt eine wachsende Literatur zur ”verhaltensorientierten“bzw. ”psychologischen“ Spieltheorie. Die meisten dieser Ansätze beziehen verschiedeneVorstellungen von Fairness, Ungleichheitsaversion oder andere intrinsischeMotive in die Nutzenfunktion ein, um empirisch beobachtbare...

A common feature of the literature on the evolution of preferencesis that evolution favors nonmaterialistic preferences only if preferencetypes are observable at least to some degree. We argue that this resultis due to the assumption that in each state of the evolutionary dynam-ics some Bayesian...

We analyze the effect of investments in corporate social responsibility(CSR) on workers’ motivation. In our experiment, a gift exchange game variant,CSR is captured by donating a certain share of profits to a charity. Weare testing for CSR effects by varying the possible share of profits given...

Recent research has cast some doubt on the general validity of outcome-basedmodels of social preferences. We develop a model based on cognitive dissonance thatfocuses on the importance of self-image. An experiment (a dictator game variant)tests the model.First, we nd that subjects whose choices...

Empirical evidences show that investors tend to be biased toward investing indomestic (home bias) and local (local bias) stocks. Familiarity is considered to be one of thereasons. A similar concept was proposed by Goldstein and Gigerenzer (1999, 2002), known asthe recognition heuristic: “when...

“Waste not want not” expresses our culture’s aversion to waste. “I could have gotten the samething for less” is a sentiment that can diminish pleasure in a transaction. We study people’s willingnessto “pay” to avoid this spoiler. In one scenario, participants imagined they were...

One-way communication has been found to substantially increasecontributions in linear voluntary contribution mechanisms. We confirmthe robustness of this result in the presence of income heterogeneity.