In four studies (S1-S4; N = 320) we investigated whether moral hypocrisy (MH) is motivated by conscious impression management concerns or whether it is self-deceptive. In a dictator game, MH occurred both within participants (saying one thing, doing another; S1) and between participants (doing...

This paper tests social identity theory with respect to individuals' self-identification behavior. We report results from a laboratory experiment in which subjects choose their group membership, which is interpreted as decision to identify with the respective group. Inducing a trade-off between...

In a principal-agent setup, we investigate agents disclosure of conflict of interests revealing deliberate or undeliberate kindness and its affect on principals reciprocal behavior. To this end, we firstly introduce a theoretical model refering to Hart and Moore (2008) which captures aspects of...

In this paper we analyze a consumer choice model with price uncertainty, loss aversion, and expectation-based reference points. The implications of this model are tested in an experiment in which participants have to make a consumption choice between two sandwiches. We make use of the fact that...

We argue that entrepreneurial choice proceeds in at least two steps, with vocational choice nearly always preceding choice of employment status, whether that be self-employment or dependent employment. Since the two decisions are interrelated, analysis of entrepreneurial choice as a single act...

Is welfare economics still possible, when preferences are endogenously determined? The answer is yes, if and only if the hypothesis of adaptive preferences is correct. If preferences satisfy the conditions of continuity, non-satiation and regularity, then adaptive preferences imply that...

Existing work on the economics of well-being suggests that a person's subjective well-being depends to a large degree on his relative standing within his social environment. In this paper, we examine whether access to modern information and telecommunication technologies has an impact on...

Nations that have managed to become rich have had institutional features that supported incentives for value creation while ensuring that the ways insiders and special interest groups can extract monopoly rents are limited. Improved skills have been a central component of helping individuals and...

This paper empirically analyzes how performance feedback and information on heterogeneity affect behavior in dynamic contests, using data on two-player-contests from a smartphone/tablet application called ``Wordblitz for Friends''. We find that players increase output as underdogs and decrease...

Ambiguity aversion has shown to be economically relevant and has been proposed as an explanation for many phenomena in economics and finance. While the literature has suggested a large variety of elicitation methods to measure ambiguity preferences, their consistency and reliability it is rarely...