We investigate the effects of an institutional mechanism that incentivizes taxpayers to blow the whistle on collusive corruption and tax compliance. We explore this through a formal leniency program. In our experiment, we nest collusive corruption within a tax evasion framework. We not only...

Our study explores the decision to participate in the shadow economy and evade taxes. It does so in light of expected unity maximization and behavioral economics. We report a laboratory experiment where a hypothetical credit market involved participants on both the supply and demand sides of the...

We present a general equilibrium model where manufacturing and service firms coexist. The quality of the service depends on the workers' effort. Two institutional regimes are compared, in which the service-providing firms are for-profit enterprises or, alternatively, nonprofit organizations. The...

In this paper we formulate and investigate experimentally a model of how individuals choose between time sequences of monetary outcomes. The theoretical model assumes that a decision-maker uses, sequentially, two criteria to screen options. Each criterion only permits a decision between some...

We experimentally investigate social effects in a principal-agent setting with incomplete contracts. The strategic interaction scheme is based on the Investment Game (Berg et al., 1995). In our setting four trustees and one trustor are interacting and the access to choices of peers in the group...

The effect of different audit patterns on future compliance is studied in two experiments. A repeated measures design is used with participants filing taxes 60 times. Study 1 focuses on taxpayers' immediate reactions to audits and examines whether a strong decrease in compliance following an...

Although it is now recognized that norms play an important role in many economic decisions, compliance with conventions is generally considered to be driven by rational self-interest only. We report instead experimental data showing that (1) ‘external’ norms of fairness sustain social...

The bias generated by the subjective perception of scarcity on the consumer's choice is investigated using two separated experiments. The first experiment is aimed to define the prevailing preferences towards a set of commodities, the second experiment checked the effects produced by the...