I use game-theoretical models to compare a sender's expected payoff under two methods of wielding influence under incomplete information: offering rewards or threatening punishments. Attempts to influence another's behaviour can have the perverse effect of actually encouraging the behaviour that...

Volunteering is a widespread allocation mechanism at the workplace and emerges naturally in open-source software development, the generation of online knowledge platforms, and to some extent in "agile" work environments. Using a field experiment with 8 treatments and close to 2,800 workers on an...

We investigate overlapping contests in multi-divisional organizations in which an individual's effort simultaneously determines the outcome of several contests on different hierarchical levels. We show that individuals in larger units are disadvantaged in the grand (organization-wide) contest...

Contests are well-established mechanisms for political lobbying, innovation, rentseeking, incentivizing workers, and advancing R&D. A well-known theoretical result in the contest literature is that greater heterogeneity decreases investments of contestants because of the "discouragement effect."...

Many papers have reported behavioral biases in belief formation that come on top of standard game-theoretic reasoning. We show that the processes involved depend on the way participants reason about their beliefs. When they think about what everybody else or another "unspeci fied" individual is...

Successful coordination is key for economic and societal wealth. The rich literature on the minimum-effort game (MEG) has provided valuable insights into coordination, both theoretically and empirically. Yet, although real-world scenarios often involve asymmetric benefits and/or costs from...

We reassess the well-known "narrow-but-deep" versus "broad-but-shallow" trade-off in international environmental agreements (IEAs), taking into account the principal-agent relationship induced by the hierarchical structure of international policy. To this end, we expand the modest coalition...

We use an experiment to test the hypothesis that groups consisting of like-minded cooperators are able to cooperate irrespective of punishment and therefore have a lower demand for a costly punishment institution than groups of like-minded free riders, who are unable to cooperate without...

We investigate overlapping contests in multi-divisional organizations in which an individual's effort simultaneously determines the outcome of several contests on different hierarchical levels. We show that individuals in smaller units are advantaged in the grand (organization-wide) contest for...

We study the role of information about the multiplier in a finitely repeated investment game. A high multiplier increases the reputational incentives of a trustee, leading to more repayments. Our perfect Bayesian equilibrium analysis shows that if the trustee is privately informed about the...