This paper studies the role of information in dictator and impunity games. We experiment with four settings: i) a standard dictator game; ii) a dictator game where the surplus size is stochastic, with a probability of being a big or small pie, and the actual size is unobservable to the responder;...

Supporting start-ups by unemployed persons with governmental programs became an important issue as benefits could include termination of unemployment and further job creation. However, it is feared that previously unemployed lack qualifications for entrepreneurship. We analyze potential effects...

In less developed and transition economies, microlending has become an efficient instrument for providing small and micro-businesses with the necessary financial resources to launch operations. In the industrialized countries, with their highly developed banking systems, however, there has been...

Risk attitudes have an impact on not only the decision to become an entrepreneur but also on the survival and failure rates of entrepreneurs. Whereas recent research underpins the theoretical proposition of a positive correlation between risk attitudes and the decision to become an entrepreneur,...

In this paper we investigate whether consumer loans are used to finance business activities. We show that self-employed households particularly use personal overdrafts significantly more often than employee households. The difference remains when controlling for financial and non-financial...

This paper empirically analyzes whether the character-based approach, which focuses on the personality structure and the human capital of business founders, allows prediction of entrepreneurial success. A unique data set is used consisting of 414 persons whose personal characteristics were...

For many people "solidarity" has become a meaningless word used in slogans - too often used without leading to any economic consequences. We show in this paper conditions under which solidarity can be a powerful instrument. In a solidary action, an individual in a group contributes to a series...

How can a principal (an agent) ensure that an agent (a principal) will work (pay up), if payment (work) precedes work (payment)? When a banknote is torn in two, each part is by itself worthless. A principal can pre-commit to payment-on-delivery, by tearing a banknote and giving the agent the...

We experimentally test the efficacy of indenture as a self-enforced contract device. In an indenture game, the principal signals the intention of payment-on-delivery, by tearing a banknote and giving the agent half of it as prepayment; the agent receives the completing half after delivering the...

This paper experimentally investigates the nature of image concerns in gift giving. For this, we test variants of dictator and impunity games where the influences of social preferences on behavior are kept constant across all games. Givers maximize material payoffs by pretending to be fair when...