The market for retail financial products (e.g. investment funds or insurance) is marred by information asymmetries. Clients are not well informed about the quality of these products. They have to rely on the recommendations of advisors. Incentives of advisors and clients may not be aligned, when...

An advisor is supposed to recommend a financial product in the best interest of her client. However, the best product for the client may not always be the product yielding the highest commission to the advisor. Do advisors nevertheless provide truthful advice? If not, will a voluntary or...

An advisor is supposed to recommend a financial product in the best interest of her client. However, the best product for the client may not always be the product yielding the highest commission (paid by product providers) to the advisor. Do advisors nevertheless provide truthful advice? If not,...

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...

The market for retail financial products (e.g. investment funds or insurances) is marred by information asymmetries. Clients are not well informed about the quality of these products. They have to rely on the recommendations of advisors. Incentives of advisors and clients may not be aligned,...

We analyse pricing, effort and tipping decisions in the online service "Google Answers". While users set a price for the answer to their question ex ante, they can additionally give a tip to the researcher ex post. In line with the related experimental literature we find evidence that tipping is...

Customers at the online music label Magnatune can pay what they want for albums, as long as the payment is within a given price range ($5-$18). Magnatune recommends to pay $8, and on average customers paid $8.20 (Regner and Barria, 2009). We ran an online survey and collected responses from 227...