In an experimental setting impulse-response behaviour in intuitive inflation forecasting is analysed. Participants were asked to forecast future values of inflation for a fictitious economy after receiving charts and lists of past values of inflation and output gap. Thirty periods were...

Growing interest in using personality variables in economic research leads to the question whether personality as measured by psychology is useful to predict economic behavior. Is it reasonable to expect values on personality scales to be predictive of behavior in economic games? It is undoubted...

Social-psychological research reveals two opposite ways in which a person can respond to increased feelings of uncertainty in decision-making. First, he (or she) may try to reduce his uncertainty by searching for more specific information. This leads to less stereotyping and discrimination....

Economic theory argues that competition can diminish discrimination in the labor market, while arguments from social psychology’s social-identity theory point into the opposite direction. We ran two experiments to test the psychological predictions in an ‘economic’ setting. Participants...

Women often receive lower wages than men for comparable work. Many explanations are offered for this fact, ranging from women’s lower negotiation skills to discrimination by employers. In this paper, an experiment, which was originally conceptualized to test efficiency-wage theory, has been...

We examine gender differences in trust in another party's cooperation (CC) or its ability (AC). While men and women do not differ concerning trust in cooperation, gender has a strong influence when trust in another subject's ability is required.

Decision-makers are sometimes influenced by the way in which choice situations are presented to them or "framed." This can be seen as an important challenge to the social sciences, since strong and pervasive framing effects would make it difficult to study human behavior in a synthetic or...

The beauty contest game has been used to analyze how many steps of reasoning subjects are able to perform. A common finding is that a majority seem to have low levels of reasoning. We use eye-tracking to investigate not only the number chosen in the game, but also the strategies in use and the...

The “aging employee” has recently become a hot topic in many fields of behavioural research. With the aim to determine the effects of different incentive schemes (competition, social or increased monetary incentives) on performance of young and older subjects, we look at behaviour of a group...

According to social-psychological research, feelings of uncertainty in decision-making evoke two opposite responses: (i) reduction of uncertainty by information search, leading to less stereotyping of people, and hence less discrimination; (ii) social identification with an ingroup, inducing...