Fungibility of money is a central principle in economics. It implies that any unit of money is substitutable for another and that the composition of income is irrelevant for consumption. We find in a field experiment that even in a simple, incentivized setup many subjects do not treat money as...

This paper studies how a preference for consistency can affect economic decision-making.We propose a two-period model where people have a preference for consistency becauseconsistent behavior allows them to signal personal and intellectual strength. We then presentthree experiments that study...

The evaluation of labor market policies has become an important issue in many Europeancountries. In recent years, a number of them have opened their administrative databases forevaluation studies. The advantages of administrative data are straightforward: they areaccurate, contain a large number...

We provide evidence on how two important types of institutions - dismissal barriers, and bonus pay - affect contract enforcement behavior in a market with incomplete contracts and repeated interactions. Dismissal barriers are shown to have a strong negative impact on worker performance, and...

This paper shows that a principal's distrust in the voluntary performanceof an agent has a negative impact on the agent's motivation to perform well.

This paper shows an economic experiment on network formation, inwhich subjects can decide to form links to one another.

During the last two decades economists have made much progress in understanding incentives, contracts and organisations. Yet, they constrained their attention to a very narrow and empirically questionable view of human motivation. The purpose of this paper is to show that this narrow view of...

Vorliegendes Arbeitspapier belegt mit Hilfe verschiedener Experimentalstudien, dass der der Homo Oeconomicus weitaus weniger universell ist, als gemeinhin angenommen wird.

In this paper we study experimentally four remedies to overcome inefficienciesthat arise from the incompleteness of contracts...

This paper examines the determinants of informal sanctions by a large number of experiments.