People's desire for fair transactions can play an important role in negotiations, organizations, and markets. In this paper, we show that markets can also shape what people consider to be a fair transaction. We propose a simple and generally-applicable model of path-dependent fairness...

People’s fairness preferences are an important constraint for what constitutes an acceptable economic transaction, yet little is known about how these preferences are formed. In this paper, we provide clean evidence that contrast effects arising from previous transactions play an important...

Recent field evidence suggests a positive link between overconfidence and innovative activities. In this paper we argue that the connection between overconfidence and innovation is more complex than the previous literature suggests. In particular, we show theoretically and experimentally that...

Research on leadership in economics has developed in parallel to the literature in management and psychology and links between the fields have been sparse. Whereas modern leadership scholars mostly focus on transformational and related leadership styles, economists have mainly emphasized the...

Work and trade relationships are often governed by relational contracts, in which incentives for cooperative action today stem from the prospective future benefits of the relationship. In this paper, we study how reductions in clarity about the financial consequences of actions, induced by...

Organizational structures are an important determinant of individual incentives and thus individual motivation in organizations. We study whether their effects on individual motivation go beyond incentives and how they relate to the perceived legitimacy of organizational structure. To this end,...

We empirically assess whether hindsight bias has consequences on how citizens evaluate their political actors. Using an incentivized elicitation technique, we demonstrate that people systematically misremember their past policy preferences regarding how to best fight the Covid-19 pandemic. At...

Companies typically control various aspects of their workers' behaviors. In this paper, we investigate whether the hierarchical distance of the superior who imposes such control measures matters for the workers' ensuing reaction. In particular, we test, in a laboratory experiment, whether...

Personal autonomy has been argued to be fundamental to well-being and is often discussed as an important driver of economic and political behavior. Yet, preferences for autonomy are not well understood, because their identification requires the separation of instrumental value attached to...

Philosophers, psychologists, and economists have long argued that certain decision rights carry not only instrumental value but may also be valuable for their own sake. The ideas of autonomy, freedom, and liberty derive their intuitive appeal-at least partly-from an assumed positive intrinsic...