This paper investigates in a principal-agent environment whether and how group membership influences the effectiveness of incentives and when incentives can have hidden costs, i.e., a detrimental effect. We show experimentally that in all interactions control mechanisms can have hidden costs for...

How important are national macroeconomic indicators for people’s satisfaction with democracy? This paper empirically explores the link from macroeconomic variables to support for established democratic systems. We combine country-level data on growth, inflation, and unemployment from the OECD...

During the Great Recession mass demonstrations indicated weakened political support in Europe. We show that growing dissatisfaction often reflects poor economic conditions and unemployment is particularly important. Using individual level data for 16 Western European countries for 1976-2010, we...

During the Great Recession mass demonstrations indicated weakened political support in Europe. We show that growing dissatisfaction reflects poor economic conditions; unemployment is particularly important. Using individual level data for 16 Western European countries for 1976-2010, we find that...

Experimental evidence from simple distribution games supports the view that some individuals have a concern for the effciency of allocations. This motive could be important for the implementation of economic policy proposals. In a typical lab experiment, however, individuals have much more...

We use quantifiers and selection functions to represent simultaneous move games. Quantifiers and selection functions are examples of higher-order functions. A higher order function is a function whose domain is itself a set of functions. Thus, quantifiers and selection func- tions allow players...

We use quantifiers and selection functions to generalize the classical economic approach to choice. Our framework encompasses preference and utility based approaches as special cases, but also extends to non-maximizing behavior and context-dependent motives such as social concerns. We adapt the...

This paper investigates in a principal-agent environment whether and how group membership influences the effectiveness of incentives and when incentives can have "hidden costs", i.e., a detrimental effect. We show experimentally that in all interactions control mechanisms can have hidden costs...