When an upstream monopolist supplies several competing downstream firms, it may fail to monopolize the market because of opportunistic behavior towards the downstream firms. We analyze this well-known commitment problem in an experiment where we extend previous research by allowing for...

We study cross-risk preferences over wealth and two other attributes to obtain theory-free evidence on correlation aversion as well as higher-order cross-traits like cross-prudence and cross-temperance. Two experiments elicit the dependence structure of risk preferences between wealth and,...

An allocation rule that prioritizes registered donors increases the willingness to register for organ donation, as laboratory experiments show. In public opinion, however, this priority rule faces repugnance. We explore the discrepancy by implementing a vote on the rule in a donation experiment,...

We explore how competition affects firms obfuscation strategies in laboratory experiments. Firms sell a base good and an add-on product. The price of the add-on may be shrouded and, if so, myopic consumers pay too much. Shrouding is an equilibrium but an unshrouding equilibrium coexists. In our...

Temptation and self-control in intertemporal choice environments are receiving increasing attention in the theoretical economics literature. Nevertheless, there remains a scarcity of empirical evidence from controlled environments informing behavior under repeated temptations. This is...

We present evidence from a laboratory experiment that individuals who feel having been treated unfairly in the interaction with others are more likely to cheat in a subsequent, unrelated game. We interpret this result as showing that the violation of a social norm (fairness) by others can be...

In this paper, the preference reversal phenomenon known from risk research is investigated according to which subjects prefer gamble A over B in competitive decisions although they reveal higher valuations in terms of a cash equivalent (CE) or a willingness to pay (WTP) for the latter when...

Managers often use tournament incentive schemes which motivate workers to compete for the top, compete to avoid the bottom, or both. In this paper we test the effectiveness and efficiency of these incentive schemes. To do so, we utilize optimal contracts in a principal-agent setting, using a...

Do politico-economic systems influence how control affects motivation? We hypothesize that control aversion, meaning crowding-out of intrinsic motivation due to enforcement, has evolved less under the coercive regime of East Germany than under the liberal regime of West Germany. We test this...

This study focuses on luck as a source of inequality, including (1) sheer luck and (2) luck that correlates with individual characteristics, such as gender and ethnicity. While the former is more random, the latter is more discriminatory. A strand of previous literature treats luck more...