Unethical behavior within organizations is not rare. We investigate experimentally the role of status-seeking behavior in sabotage and cheating activities aiming at improving one’s performance ranking in a flat-wage environment. We find that average effort is higher when individuals are...

The standard procedure in experimental economics maintains anonymity among participants. Yet, many field interactions are conducted with neither complete anonymity nor complete familiarity. How will people respond to varying degrees of anonymity and social distance? We consider the effect of one...

We explore play between groups where one member of each 2-person group dictates the play of that group and is therefore responsible for the payoff of the other group member. We compare this to play when the game is the same, but each person is playing only for herself. Consistent with the...

In this paper, we report the results of experiments designed to test whether individuals and groups abide by the axioms of monotonicity, with respect to first-order stochastic dominance and Bayesian updating, when making decisions in the face of risk. The results indicate a significant number of...

The Winner's Curse (WC) is one of the most robust and persistent deviations from theoretical predictions that has been established in experimental economics and claimed to exist in many field environments. There have been many attempts to explain the winner's curse, such as ignoring the...

Many authors have discussed an apparent shift to a new employment contract characterized by less commitment between employer and employee, and closer ties between wages within the enterprise and those in the external labor market. We study the issue of when people in the U.S. and Canada feel pay...

It is standard in agency theory to search for incentive-compatible mechanisms on the assumption that people care only about their own material wealth. Yet it may be useful to consider social forces in mechanism design and contract theory. We devise an experiment to explore optimal contracts in a...

Previous indirect evidence suggests that impulses towards pro-social behavior are diminished when an external authority is responsible for an outcome. The responsibility-alleviation effect states that a shift of responsibility to an external authority dampens internal impulses toward honesty,...

Economists have developed various methods to elicit risk preferences, which can help forecast decision-making in risky scenarios. However, risk elicitation can be complex, and there remain unresolved challenges. Our research demonstrates that repeated exposure to risk elicitation tasks, such as...

We study worker behavior in an efficiency-wage environment where co-workers' wages can influence a worker's effort. Theoretically, we show that an increase in workers' responsiveness to co-workers' wages should lead profit-maximizing firms to compress wages. Our laboratory experiments, on the...