Based on two representative samples of employees, the German Socio Economic Panel and the European Social Survey, we explore the relation between certain measures of control in employment relationships (i. e. working time regulations, use of performance appraisal systems, monitoring by...

We analyze mechanism choices of competing sellers with private valuations and show the existence of monotone pure strategy equilibria where sellers with higher reservation value choose mechanisms with a lower selling probability and a larger revenue in case of trade. As an application we...

Many experiments and field studies indicate that most individuals are not purely motivated by material self-interest but also care about the well being of others. In this paper, we examine tournaments among inequity averse agents, who dislike disadvantageous inequity (envy) and advantageous...

We investigate two theoretical approaches that focus on bonuses as part of a firm’s long-term wage policy. The first approach argues that explicit bonuses serve as substitutes for implicit career concerns. The second claims that bonuses act as complements to an executive’s internal career....

We investigate the effects of works councils on employees' wages and job satisfaction in general and for subgroups with respect to sex and occupational status. Making use of a German representative sample of employees, we find that employees, who move to a firm with a works council, report...

Making use of a subjective performance appraisal system, it is a well-established fact that many supervisors tend to assess the employees too good (leniency bias) and that the appraisals hardly vary across employees of a certain supervisor (centrality bias). We explain these two biases in a...

Based on a German representative sample of employees we explore the relevance and development of further training in private sector firms. We focus on formal training and explore possible individual and job-based determinants of its incidence. We also show changes over time during a 20 year...

We assemble two reference point based concepts of utility in our empirical study: the own previous status quo and social comparisons. We explore the relative relevance of these concepts for total compensation as well as for different parts of the compensation package of managers. Making use of a...

In economic approaches it is often argued that reputation considerations influence the behavior of individuals or firms and that reputation influences the outcome of markets. Empirical evidence is rare though. In this contribution we argue that a positive reputation of sellers should have an...