The use of experimental settings to observe human behaviour in a controlled environment of incentives, rules and institutions, has been widely used by the behavioural sciences for some time now, particularly by psychology and economics. In most cases the subjects are college students recruited...

This paper develops a finite mixture distribution analysis of Beauty- Contest data obtained from diverse groups of experiments. ML estimation using the EM approach provides estimates for the means and variances of the component distributions, which are common to all the groups, and estimates of...

We present a field experiment to assess the effect of own and peer wage variations on actual work effort of employees with hourly wages. Work effort neither reacts to an increase of the own wage, nor to a positive or negative peer comparison. This result seems at odds with numerous laboratory...

Time-consuming and costly religious rituals pose a puzzle for economists committed to rational choice theories of human behavior. We propose that either through selection or a causal relationship, the performance of religious rituals is associated with higher levels of cooperation. To test this...

This paper analyzes data for a random sample drawn from the Dutch population who reveal their capacity to provide and sustain social capital by their propensity to invest and reward investments by means of an economic experiment. We have three main results. First, we find that heterogeneity in...