Charness et al. (2007b) have shown that group membership has a strong effect on individualdecisions in strategic games when group membership is salient through payoff commonality.In this comment I show that their findings also apply to non-strategic decisions, even when nooutgroup exists, and I...

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...

We investigate experimentally whether entry costs have an impact on the evolutionof cooperation in a social dilemma game. In particular, subjects repeatedly playthe so-called takeover game with anonymous partners randomly drawn from a fixedpopulation of participants. The game represents a social...

This paper reports two laboratory studies designed to study the impact of public informationabout past departure rates on congestion levels and travel costs. Our experimental design isbased on a discrete version of Arnott, de Palma, and Lindsey’s (1990) bottleneck model wheresubjects have to...

Even though decision-making in small teams is pervasive in business and in private life, littleis known about subjects’ preferences with respect to individual and team decision-making andabout the consequences of respecting these preferences. We report the results from anexperimental...

We present a field experiment to assess the effect of own and peer wage variations onactual work effort of employees with hourly wages. Work effort neither reacts to anincrease of the own wage, nor to a positive or negative peer comparison. This resultseems at odds with numerous laboratory...

In an experimental study we examine a variant of the ‘minimum effort game’, acoordination game with Pareto ranked equilibria, and risk considerations pointing to theleast efficient equilibrium. We focus on the question whether simple cues such as smiles,winks and handshakes could be...

We present a model where compensation within a workteam is determinedendogenously by the use of a rank-order tournament. Team memberscompete in their efforts for the right to propose the distribution of a prizewithin the team. The implementation of a proposal requires the approvalof other team...

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 study the influence of gender on economic decision making in a two-person bargaining game. By testing hypotheses derived from evolutionary psychology and social role theory, we find that (1) gender per se has no significant effect on behavior, whereas (2) gender pairing systematically affects...