Direct transfers allow heirs to freely use what has been passed on to them. Bequeathers who do not trust their descendants to make proper use of the fortune may prefer investing it in a safe foundation, thereby limiting their descendants’ autonomy. In our study we compare experimentally these...

We study a market in which both buyers and sellers can decide to preempt and set theirquantities before market clearing. Will this lead to preemption on both sides of the market,only one side of the market, or to no preemption at all? We …nd that preemption tends to beasymmetric in the sense...

Conventions can be narrowly interpreted as coordinated ways of equilibriumplay, i.e., a specific convention tells all players in a game withmultiple strict equilibria which equilibrium to play. In our view, coordinationoften takes place before learning about the games. Thus, one hasto coordinate...

In one-shot investment game experiments where each player's payo is a convexcombination of own and other's prot, trust remains unaected by the extent of interdependencewhereas trustworthiness reacts positively to it.

To explain why pre-play communication increases cooperation in games,one refers to a) strategic causes such as efficient communication or reputationeffects, and b) changes in the utilities due to social processes. Hithertoexperimental support for both explanations is mixed and confounded....

We study the effects of leadership on the private provision of a public good when group members are heterogeneously endowed. Leadership is implemented as a sequential public goods game where one group member contributes first and all the others follow. Our results show that the presence of a...

We study sequential parimutuel betting markets with asymmetrically informed bettors, usingan experimental approach. In one treatment, groups of eight participants play twenty repetitionsof a sequential betting game. The second treatment is identical, except that bettors are observedby other...

In a large scale newspaper experiment 5,132 readers of the German weekly, Die Zeit, participated in a three-person bargaining game. In our data analysis we focus on (1) the influence of age, gender, profession and the medium chosen for participation on bargaining behavior and on (2) the external...

Although relative performance schemes are pervasive in organizations reliable empirical dataon induced sabotage behavior is almost non-existent. We study sabotage in tournaments in acontrolled laboratory experiment and are able to confirm one of the key insights from theory:effort and sabotage...

We investigate overlapping contests in multi-divisional organizations in which an individual's effort simultaneously determines the outcome of several contests on different hierarchical levels. We show that individuals in smaller units are advantaged in the grand (organization-wide) contest for...