As firms implement tournament bonus reward schemes, mainly the idea is to introduce competition amongst their agents in the order to promote their performance.Tournaments in which agents compete for a bonus by investing effort, are frequentlyapplied, e.g., in development races, political...

In this paper, we experimentally test the Modigliani-Miller theorem. Applying ageneral equilibrium approach and not allowing for arbitrage among ¯rms with differ-ent capital structure, we are able to address a question fundamental to the valuationof firms: does capital structure affect the...

Similar to welfare economics where with(out) interpersonal comparisonsone defines unique (set-valued) welfare (Pareto) optima, we present a frameworkfor one-person decision making where with(out) a prior probability distributionindividual optimality prescribes usually a unique (set of)...

We experimentally investigate how affective processes influence proposers’and responders’ behaviour in the Ultimatum Game. Using a dualsystemapproach, we tax cognitive resources through time pressure andcognitive load to enhance the influence of affective processes on behaviour.We find that...

We experimentally test how acceptance thresholds react to the decisionof the proposer in a three party ultimatum game to exclude oneof two responders with veto power from the game. We elicit responderacceptance thresholds in case the proposer decides to exclude one ofthem, what increases the...

We examine in an experiment the causes, consequences and possible cures ofmyopic loss aversion (MLA) for investment behaviour under risk. We find thatboth, investment horizons and feedback frequency contribute almost equally tothe effects of MLA. Longer investment horizons and less frequent...

Theoretically and experimentally, we generalize the analysis of acquiringa company (Samuelson and Bazerman 1985) by allowing for competition ofboth, buyers and sellers. Naivety of both is related to the idea that higherprices exclude worse qualities. While competition of naive buyers...

In a two-person finitely repeated public goods experiment, we use intentionsdata to interpret individual behavior. Based on a random-utilitymodel specification, we develop a relationship between a player's beliefsabout others' behavior and his contributions' plans, and use this relationshipto...

Economic theory has evolved without paying proper attention to behavioral approaches,especially to social, economic, and cognitive psychology. This has recently changed byincluding behavioral economics courses in many doctoral study programs. Although thisnew development is most welcome, the...

Using a symmetric 2-person prisoners’ dilemma as the base game, each playerreceives a signal for the number of rounds to be played with the same partner.The actual number of rounds (the length of the supergame) is determined bythe maximal signal where each player expects the other’s signal...