The question whether a minimum rate of sick pay should be mandated is much debated. We study the effects of this kind of intervention in an experimental labor market that is rich enough to allow for moral hazard, adverse selection, and crowding out of good intentions to occur. We find that...

We study a novel, repeated common pool resource game in which current resource stocks depend on resource extraction in previous periods. Our model shows that for a sufficiently high regrowth rate, there is no commons dilemma: the resource will be preserved indefinitely in equilibrium. Lower...

Controversy exists about the act of giving as altruistic instead of self-interested behavior. Each side of this argument interprets similar results from similar experiments in different ways. One side argues the results show that the appearance of altruistic behavior can be explained by...

It is common in studies of individual choice behavior to report averages of the behavior under consideration. In the social sciences the mean is, indeed, often the quantity of interest, but at times focusing on the mean can be misleading. For example, it is well known in labor economics that...

The paper studies the role of information transparency on fairness concerns,welfare and efficiency. When the firm's productivity and ultimately profits are revealed, wage offers induce relatively fair divisions of potential gains and workers respond with higher performance. Workers respond not...

We study experimentally “partnership protocols” of the sort proposed by Kalai and Kalai (2010), for bilateral trade games with incomplete information. We utilize the familiar game analyzed by Chatterjee and Samuelson (1983) and Myerson and Sattherwaite (1983), with a buyer and seller with...

Using the experimental sessions of Goeree and Holt (2005), we show that step thinking fits the long-run outcome of minimum-effort and median-effort games surprisingly well for all values of the cost parameter. In the latter, the predicted discontinuous behaviour of step thinking accommodates the...

Adding to the debate about the “broken windows” thesis we discuss an explanation of minor norm violation based on the assumption that individuals infer expected sanctioning probabilities from contextual cues. We modify the classical framework of rational crime by signals of disorder, local...

In this paper, we test whether increased salience of a tax charge increases dishonesty using a version of the die-under-cup paradigm. Participants earn money in proportion to the outcome reported and, thus, have an incentive to over-report. We find a significant increase in high outcomes in the...