Medical doctors act as agents of their patients by either treating them directly or referring them to other more or differently specialized doctors, who thereby become "agents of agents". The main aim of this paper is to model central aspects of such two-layered agency relations in the medical...

Whether incentive contracts perform better than trust in terms of productive efficiency is usually explored by principal-agent experiments (most involving only one agent). We investigate this issue in the context of a three-person ultimatum experiment, which is simpler and more neutrally framed...

We experimentally examine how group identity affects trust behavior in an investment game. In one treatment, group identity is induced purely by minimal groups. In other treatments, group members are additionally related by outcome interdependence established in a prior public goods game. Moving...

Leadership is important for the well-functioning of organizations. We examine the effects of leadership on contributions in public goods experiments. Leadership by example is implemented by letting one group member contribute to the public good before followers do. Such leadership increases...

Idiosyncratic risk attitudes are usually assumed to be commonly known and restricted to own payoffs. However, the alternatives faced by a decision maker often involve risks for others' payoffs as well. Motivated by the importance of other-regarding preferences in social interactions, this paper...

We examine the effects of leading by example in voluntary contribution experiments. Leadership is implemented by letting one group member contribute to the public good before followers do. Such leadership increases contributions in comparison to the standard voluntary contribution mechanism,...

Direct transfers allow heirs to freely use what has been passed on to them. Bequeathers who do not trust their descendants to make proper use of the fortune may prefer investing it in a safe foundation, thereby limiting their descendants' autonomy. In our study we compare experimentally these...

We report on an experiment designed to explore the interrelation of other-regarding concerns with attitudes towards risk and delay when the latter have a social dimension, i.e., pertain to one's own and another person's payoffs. For this sake, we compare evaluations of several prospects, each of...

We consider a society composed of two regions. Each of them provides a public good whose benefits reach beyond local boundaries. In case of decentralization, taxes collected by members of a region are spent only on that region's public good. In case of centralization, tax receipts from the two...

A novel two-person "charity game" is used to experimentally investigate whether anticipation of help crowds out incentives to work, and therefore impulses to help. We distinguish two treatments differing in whether the causes of neediness are verifiable or not. Helping behavior does not vary...