Koukoumelis et al. (2010, 2012) have shown that one-way communication enhances contributions to public goods. We investigate the effectiveness of one-way communication, when the benefits from the public good are asymmetric and the sender of a message is the main beneficiary of cooperation. Our...

Using a new dataset with detailed geographic information about licensing activities of the Max Planck Society, Germany's largest non-university public research organization, we analyze how the probability and magnitude of commercial success are affected by geographic distance between licensors...

The determinants of risk attitude amongst family members are explored using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel over the period 2004 to 2009. The focus of the analysis is the repeated responses to the survey question about general willingness to take risk. Responses to this question are...

In this paper, we focus on the analysis of individual decision making for the formation of social networks, using experimentally generated data. We first analyse the determinants of the individual demand for links under the assumption of agents' static expectations. The results of this exercise...

Based on representative data, the German Micro-Census, we provide an overview of the development of self-employment and entrepreneurship in Germany between 1991 and 2011, the first two decades after reunification. We investigate the socio-economic background of these individuals, their...

Weizsäcker (2010) estimates the payoff of actions to test rational expectations and to measure the success of social learning in information cascade experiments. He concludes that participants perform poorly when learning from others and that rational expectations are violated. We show that his...

We introduce a procedurally fair rule to study a situation where people disagree about the value of three alternatives in the way captured by the voting paradox. The rule allows people to select a final collective ranking by submitting a bid vector with six components (the six possible rankings...

Abundant evidence suggests that high levels of contributions to public goods can be sustained through self-governed monitoring and sanctions. This experimental study investigates the effectiveness of decentralized sanctioning institutions where punishment opportunities are restricted to agents...

Participants in a public goods experiment receive private or common signals regarding the so-called "point of no return", meaning that if the group's total contribution falls below this point, all payoffs are reduced. An individual faces the usual conflict between private and collective...

Envy is often the cause of mutually harmful outcomes. We experimentally study the impact of envy in a bargaining setting in which there is no conflict in material interests: a proposer, holding the role of residual claimant, chooses the size of the pie to be shared with a responder, whose share...