We examine the incentives to self-select into politics. To this end, we set up a two-stage political competition model and test its key mechanisms in the lab. At the entry stage, potential candidates compete in a contest to become their party’s nominee. At the election stage, the nominated...

In recent decades, many firms offered more discretion to their employees, often increasing the productivity of effort but also leaving more opportunities for shirking. These "high-performance work systems" are difficult to understand in terms of standard moral hazard models. We show...

Reputation formation pervades human social life. In fact, many people go to great lengths to acquire a good reputation, although building a good reputation is costly in many cases. We know little, however, about the neural underpinnings of this important social mechanism. In the present study we...

In modern economics, preferences are the unmoved movers of economic and social behavior. They are taken as given such that all social phenomena need to be explained by changes in beliefs or constraints. The assumption of given preferences constitutes however merely a convenient assumption that...