We report three repetitions of Falk and Kosfeld's (2006) C5 and C10 treatments whose results largely conflict with those of the original study. We mainly observe hidden costs of control of low magnitude which lead to low-trust principal-agent relationships. We also report an extension where...

Studying the likelihood that individuals cheat requires a valid statistical measure of dishonesty. We develop an easy empirical method to measure and compare lying behavior within and across studies to correct for sampling errors. This method estimates the full distribution of lying when agents...

We theoretically show that agents with loss-averse preferences facing a decision to receive a bad financial payoff if they report honestly or to receive a better financial payoff if they report dishonestly are more likely to lie to avoid receiving the low payoff the lower the ex-ante probability...

This study compares risk attitudes of smallholder farmers elicited from two different lottery designs (i) with fixed payoffs and changing probabilities and (ii) with fixed probabilities and changing payoffs. We utilize a combination of experimental and household survey data collected from 332...

Evidence of Illusion of Control - the fact that people believe to have control over pure chance events - is a recurrent finding in experimental psychology. Results in economics find instead little to no support. In this paper we test whether this dissonant result across disciplines is due to the...

In many economic contexts, an elusive variable of interest is the agent's belief about relevant events, e.g. about other agents' behavior. A growing number of surveys and experiments ask participants to state beliefs explicitly but little is known about the causal relation between beliefs and...

Recent experimental studies suggest that risk aversion is negatively related to cognitive ability. In this paper we report evidence that this relation might be spurious. We recruit a large subject pool drawn from the general Danish population for our experiment. By presenting subjects with...

Variable pay not only creates a link between pay and performance but may also help firms in attracting the more productive employees (Lazear 1986, 2000). However, due to lack of natural data, empirical analyses of the relative importance of the selection and incentive effects of pay schemes are...

We report a new method for Experimenting over a Long Distance (ELD)allowing to simultaneously run decentralized interactive experiments in geographically separated subject pools. Applying ELD to an intercultural trust experiment with participants from Argentina, China and Germany we found a...

When using the strategy method in ultimatum bargaining, many researchers ask responders for the minimal acceptable offer only implicitly assuming strategies to be monotone. Recent research has shown, however, that subjects decline disadvantageous and advantageous proposals. We report on an...