In zahlreichen Experimenten wurde beobachtet, dass Menschen bewusst von auszahlungsmaximierenden Entscheidungen - von Ökonomen lange als einzig rationales Verhalten angesehen - abweichen. Diese Beobachtungen begründeten das Forschungsfeld Behavioral Economics. Diese Dissertation stellt vier...

When groups face difficult problems, the voices of experts may be lost in the noise of others' contributions. We present results from a "naturally noisy" setting, a large first-year undergraduate class, in which the expert's voice was "lost" to such a degree that bringing forward even more...

Incentives often distort behavior: they induce agents to exert effort but this effort is not employed optimally. This paper proposes a theory of incentive design allowing for such distorted behavior. At the heart of the theory is a trade-off between getting the agent to exert effort and ensuring...

Anecdotal, empirical, and experimental evidence suggests that offering extrinsic rewards for certain activities can reduce people's willingness to engage in those activities voluntarily. We propose a simple rationale for this `crowding out' phenomenon, using standard economic arguments. The...

As illustrated by the famous Ellsberg paradox, many subjects prefer to bet on events with known rather than with unknown probabilities, i.e., they are ambiguity averse. In an experiment, we examine subjects’ choices when there is an additional source of ambiguity, namely, when they do not know...

Consider a principal-agent relationship in which more effort by the agent raises the likelihood of success. Does rewarding success, i.e., paying a bonus, increase effort in this case? I find that bonuses have not only an incentive but also an income effect. Overall, bonuses paid for success may...

How does the environment of an organization influence whether workers voluntarily provide effort? We study the power relationship between a non-profit unit (e.g. university department, NGO, health trust), where workers care about the result of their work, and a bu- reaucrat, who supplies some...

When designing incentives for a manager, the trade-off between insurance and a "good" allocation of effort across various tasks is often identified with a trade-off between the responsiveness (sensitivity, precision, signal-noise ratio) of the performance measure and its similarity (congruity,...