A controversy has been simmering in law for at least 30 years about whether pro bono work should be mandatory for lawyers, who now donate 1-3% of their time to the poor. This has centered on the unmet legal needs of the poor, the duty of lawyers, and the contrast with US doctors, who are...

Sentiment indices, such as measures of consumer confidence, are often discussed as potential indicators of future investment, consumption and growth. However, documenting a causal relationship between consumer confidence and output — and understanding the precise nature of the relationship —...

Previous experiences significantly influence subsequent behavior. However, little is known about how experiences from ambiguous situations shape decision makers' subsequent ambiguity attitudes. We investigate this experimentally in an investment task that involves assets characterized by...

In economic environments, decision-makers can strategically delay irreversible investments to learn from the actions of others. This creates free-riding incentives and can lead to socially suboptimal outcomes. We experimentally examine if and how communication mitigates this free-riding problem...

In the economic literature on market competition, firms are often modeled as single decision makers and the internal organization of the firm is neglected (unitary player assumption). However, as the literature on strategic delegation suggests, one can not generally expect that the behavior of...

We report results from a Cournot triopoly experiment with different subject pools: German students, Malaysian students, and Malaysian managers. While German students play Nash, we reject the hypothesis that both Malaysian students and managers select the Nash quantity. Moreover, Malaysian...

A cartel is socially not desirable. But is it a normative problem? And has merger control reason to be concerned about tacit collusion? Neither is evident once one has seen that the members of a cartel face a problem of strategic interaction. It is routinely analysed in terms of game theory....

One may hope to capture the behavioral and emotional effects of downsizing the laborforce in rather abstract settings as an ultimatum game (see Fischer et al. (2008)), or try to explore downsizing in its more natural principalagent scenario with a labor market background. We pursue the latter...

One-shot interaction and repeated interaction often co-exist in the real world. We study possible behavioral effects of this co-existence in a principal-agent setting, in which a principal simultaneously employs a permanent and a temporary agent. Our experimental results indicate that there is...

Empirical work on Akerlof's theory of gift exchange in labor markets has concentrated on the fair wage-effort hypothesis. In fact, however, the theory also contains a social component that stipulates that homogenous agents that are employed for the same wage level will exert more effort,...