We provide an example for an errors in variables problem which might be often neglected but which is quite common in lab experimental practice: In one task, attitude towards risk is measured, in another task participants behave in a way that can possibly be explained by their risk attitude. How...

The aim of this study is to find out why people are telling the truth: is it a desire to respect trust, to avoid losses for others, or a mere distaste for lying per se? To answer this question we study a sender-receiver game where it is possible to delegate the act of lying and where it is...

Humans make decisions jointly with others. They share responsibility for the outcome with their interaction partners. Today, more and more often the partner in a decision is not another human but, instead, a machine. Here we ask whether the type of the partner, machine or human, affects our...

In this paper we use an experiment to compare a theory of risk aversion and a theory of spite as an explanation for overbidding in auctions. As a workhorse we use the second-price all-pay and the first-price winner-pay auction. Both risk and spite can be used to rationalize deviations from risk...

We study how punishment influences conditional cooperation. We ask two questions: 1) how does conditional cooperation change if a subject can be punished and 2) how does conditional cooperation change if a subject has the power to punish others. In particular, we disentangle the decision to be a...

If migrants return to their origin countries, two questions arise which are of immediate economic interest for both immigration and emigration country: What determines their optimal migration duration, and what are the activities migrants choose after a return. Little research has been devoted...

We introduce a new method of varying the risk that bidders face in first-price private value auctions. We find that decreasing bidders' risk significantly reduces the degree of overbidding relative to the risk-neutral Bayesian-Nash equilibrium prediction. This implies that risk affects bidding...

We use experiments to compare dynamic and static wars of attrition (i.e. second-price all-pay auctions) and first-price all-pay auctions. Many other studies find overbidding in first-price all-pay auctions. We can replicate this property. In wars of attrition, however, we find systematic...

In this paper we study equilibrium- and experimental bidding behaviour in first-price and second price auctions with outside options. We find that bidders do respond to outside options and to variations of common knowledge about competitors' outside options. However, overbidding in first-price...

Deviations from equilibrium bids in auctions can be related to inconsistent expectations with correct best replies (see Eyster and Rabin, 2005; Crawford and Iriberri, 2007) or correct expectations but small (perhaps quantal-response) mistakes in best replies (see Goeree et al., 2002). To distinguish...