I conduct an experiment to assess whether majority voting on a nonbindingsharing norm affects subsequent behavior in a dictator game. Ina baseline treatment, subjects play a one shot dictator game. In a votingtreatment, subjects are first placed behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ and vote onthe...

Economics has devoted little attention so far as to whether the type of decision maker matters for economic decisions. However, many important decisions like those on monetary policy or a company’s business strategy are made by (small) groups rather than an individual. We compare behaviour of...

We establish the precise connections between progressive taxation andinequality reduction, in a setting where the level of tax revenue to be raised isendogenously fixed and tax schemes are balanced. We show that, in contrastwith the traditional literature on taxation, the equivalence between...

Economists generally assume that the state has sufffcient institutional capacityto support markets and levy taxes, assumptions which cannot be taken forgranted in many states, neither historcally nor in today’s developing world.Our paper develops a framework where "policy choices" in market...

Recent developments in voting theory show that Condorcet profiles embedded in electoratesare responsible for conflicts between pairwise voting methods and for reversals ofrankings under positional methods whenever candidates are dropped or added. Because ofthe strong symmetry of the rankings of...

In this paper we show that subtle forms of deceit undermine the effectiveness of incentives.We design an experiment in which the principal has an interest in underreporting the trueperformance difference between the agents in a dynamic tournament...

On theoretical grounds, monitoring of top executives by the (supervisory) board is expectedto be value relevant. The empirical evidence is ambiguous and we analyze three noncompetingexplanations for this ambiguity: (i) The positive effect on firm value of boardmonitoring is hidden in stock price...

The Peter Principle captures two stylized facts about hierarchies: first, promotions often placeemployees into jobs for which they are less well suited than for that previously held. Second,demotions are extremely rare...