In this article we develop a taxonomy of behavioral policy measures proposed by Thaler and Sunstein (2008). Based on this taxonomy, we discuss the ethical legitimacy of these measures. First, we explain two common reservations against nudges (choice architecture) rooted in utilitarian and...

In an experiment with professionals from the financial services sector, we investigate the impact of a team incentive scheme on recommendation quality of investment products when advisors benefit from advising lower quality products. Experimental results reveal that, when group affiliation is...

Our study takes an individual perspective on receiver credulity in a public good setting with deceptive messages. In a laboratory experiment, subjects play a public good game with punishment in which feedback on actual contributions is obscured. Instead, subjects can communicate what they have...

Since governmental transparency is considered to be a key mechanism for democratic accountability and representation, we compare three analytically distinctive motivations that could potentially explain transparency support among political elites: (1) From a principal-agent perspective, elites...

This paper tests whether staying ignorant about the negative consequences of one's own actions affects agents' performance in a real effort experiment. We conducted treatments in which subjects' effort either increased only one's own payoff or also increased the donation to a bad charity....

We provide an extensive overview of the determinants of the fixed and variable compensation schemes in the German and Swiss financial services industry. We find that the financial crisis had a deep impact on the proportion of variable pay to fixed salary; this impact was caused by large...

We survey the recent literature on corporate diversification. How does corporate diversification influence firm value? Does it create or destroy value? While, until the beginning of this century, the predominant thinking among researchers and practitioners was that corporate diversification...

We study the predictive ability of individual analyst target price changes for post-event abnormal stock returns within each recommendation category. Although prior studies generally demonstrate the investment value of target prices, we find that target price changes do not cause abnormal...

This paper is the first to provide evidence of efficient taxation of groups with heterogeneous levels of 'tax morale'. We set up an optimal income tax model where high tax morale implies a high subjective cost of evading taxes. The model predicts that 'nice guys finish last': groups with higher...

In this paper we compare two flexible estimators of technical efficiency in a cross-sectional setting: the nonparametric kernel SFA estimator of Fan, Li and Weersink (1996) to the nonparametric bias corrected DEA estimator of Kneip, Simar and Wilson (2008). We assess the finite sample...