Firms regularly use incentives to motivate their employees to be more productive. However, often little attention is paid to the language used in employment contracts to describe these incentives. It may be more effective to present incentives as entitlements that can be lost by failing to reach...

Recently, large companies like Google have made substantial investments in the well-being of their workers. While evidence shows that better performing companies have happier employees, there has been much less research on whether happy employees contribute to better company performance. Finding...

Can a company attract a different type of employee by changing its compensation scheme? Is it sufficient to pay more to increase employees’ motivation? Should a firm provide evaluation feedback to employees based on their absolute or their relative performance? Laboratory experiments can help...

We introduce a simple game-theoretical model that captures the main aspects of the repeated interaction between an issuer and a credit-rating agency. It involves up-front payments of issuer-fees and direct publication of requested ratings. Due to pecuniary injuries for untruthful ratings, the...

In the laboratory experiment reported in this paper we explore how evolving institutions and social norms, which we label 'culture', change individuals' preferences and behaviour in mainland China. From 1949 China experienced dramatic changes in its socio-economic institutions. These began with...

This paper attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of the specially designed packages of water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) interventions with 'student brigades' (student teams tasked with maintaining hygiene in school) on household WASH behavior and practices in both a household and farm...

Recent literature on Adam Smith and other 18th-century Scottish thinkers shows an engaged conversation between the Scots and today's scholars in the sciences that deal with humans—social sciences, humanities, as well as neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. We share with the 18th-century...

This paper analyzes gender differences in access to competitive positions. We implement an experiment where workers can apply for a job promotion by sending a signal to their employer. We control for gender differences in anticipation of discrimination in a treatment where a computer randomly...

This paper discusses how household panels in general - and the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) in particular - can serve as reference data for researchers collecting datasets that do not represent the full universe of the population of interest (e.g., through clinical trials, intervention...

Many public goods can be provided at different spatial levels. Evidence from social identity theory and in-group favoritism raises the possibility that where higher-level provision is more efficient, subjects' narrow concern for local outcomes (parochialism) could harm efficiency. Building on...