The notion of face-to-face contacts has recently become very popular as a reason why firms still locate in proximity to others after the “death of distance.†Controlled laboratory experiments provide direct and reliable evidence on the importance of face-to-face contacts. It is the...

We let students play a corruption game, embedded into a variant of the ultimatum game. Those allotted the role of public servants chose between whistleblowing, opportunism and reciprocity by delivery (of a contract) and those acting as businesspeople chose how to frame the game and whether to...

Alain Ledoux, who was one of over 6,000 chess players taking part in Bühren and Frank´s (2012) online Beauty Contest experiment, turned out to be the forgotten inventor of that game. We reconstruct the birth of the Beauty Contest. In section 1 of our note, its first two authors outline the...

Das ifo Institut hat im letzten Jahr zusammen mit dem Deutschen Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung in Berlin im Auftrag des damaligen Bundesministeriums für Wirtschaft und Arbeit, BMWA (heutiges Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Technologie, BMWT) eine Studie zu den möglichen Auswirkungen...

This paper presents evidence on biased voting by jurors from the Warsaw Pact countries who ranked high-level chess games. The roots of this bias are probably ideological, as there were no formal benefits for biased voting. Furthermore, this bias is observed only for jurors from Eastern...

We experimentally examine the willingness to donate depending on whether “misery” has been randomly generated or self-inflicted by too high demands in bilateral negotiations. We find that randomness has a positive influence on the total amount of the donation. In the case of self-inflicted...

Reliable microdata on corrupt behavior are hard to obtain in the field, and available field data are hard to interpret. Laboratory corruption experiments have therefore recently gained in popularity, and those that shed light on gender effects are surveyed in this article. The tentative main...

Economic page turners like Freakonomics are well written and there is much to be learned from them – not only about economics, but also about writing techniques. Their authors know how to build up suspense, i.e., they make readers want to know what comes. An uncountable number of pages in...

Discusses incentives for basic research, which were recently introduced in the German Institute for Economic Research, including both team and individual incentives. Possible problems arise from focussing on the measurable, crowding out intrinsic motivation and undesirable externalities....