Under common law, the standard remedy for breach of contract is expectation damages. Under continental law, the standard is specific performance. The common law solution is ex post efficient. But is it also ex ante efficient? We use experimental methods to test whether knowing that...

There has been an increasing interest in altruistic behaviour in the domain of losses recently. Nevertheless, there is no consensus in whether the monetary losses make individuals more generous or more selfish. Although almost all relevant studies rely on a dictator game to study altruistic...

We study the origins of support for gender-related affirmative action (AA) in two pre-registered online experiments (N = 1, 700). Participants act as employers who decide whether to use AA in hiring job candidates. We implement three treatments to disentangle the preference for AA stemming from...

Can elections change people’s ideas about what is ethically right and what is wrong? A number of recent observations suggest that social norms can change rapidly as a result of election outcomes. We explore this conjecture using a controlled online experiment. In our experiment, participants...

Debates about affirmative action often revolve around fairness. Accordingly, we document substantial heterogeneity in the fairness perception of various affirmative action policies. But do these differences translate into different consequences? In a laboratory experiment, we study three...

There has been an increasing interest in altruistic behaviour in the domain of losses recently. Nevertheless, there is no consensus in whether the monetary losses make individuals more generous or more selfish. Although almost all relevant studies rely on a dictator game to study altruistic...

When affirmative action policies target more than one disadvantaged group, they contain uncertainty as to whether an individual who belongs to one of these groups was actually favored. In a laboratory experiment, we study how this feature affects outcomes of affirmative action in the form of...

Dieser Beitrag untersucht die Arbeiten von Jon Elster zum Problem lokaler Gerechtigkeit. Das Thema dieser Arbeiten sind Rationierungsentscheidungen. Es geht um die Allokation und Distribution knapper Zuteilungsgüter, also etwa um die Vergabe von Kindergarten- oder Studienplätzen, die Zuweisung...

Is an assumption of bounded rationality needed to explain Social Security and other mandatory pension plans? In this contribution we argue that when rational agents hold inconsistent expectations such programs may be justified. Two of the features that distinguish Social Security and many other...

In diesem Diskussionspapier werden die Ergebnisse einer im Mai/Juni 2007 durchgeführten Unternehmensbefragung im Raum Niedersachsen vorgestellt in Bezug auf die Fragestellung, ob sich Unternehmen, die Innovationsförderung erhalten, von nicht geförderten Unternehmen in Bezug auf generelle...