Recent discussions about rising inequality in industrialized countries have triggered calls for more government intervention and redistribution. Due to obvious behavioral effects caused by redistribution, it is however not clear whether redistributional policies are indeed able to combat...

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...

In a fundraising field experiment we show that individuals are not only conditionally cooperative, but that they are also more prone to donate to a homeless individual when the previous donor has a higher social status. We trailed a homeless person asking for donations within Cologne's metro...

We study the effects of a label awarded to universities for excellence in research on students' perception of educational quality and enrolment in subsequent admission terms. Using a representative student survey we find that students evaluate the teaching and supervision quality of their...

We propose a new model that can capture the typical features of multivariate extreme events observed in financial time series, namely clustering behavior in magnitudes and arrival times of multivariate extreme events, and time-varying dependence. The model is developed in the framework of the...

We investigate strategic interactions of Israelis and Palestinians within a controlled laboratory experiment. In our first treatment we retrieve cooperation benchmarks prevailing within both subject pools. Then we measure cooperation levels and associated beliefs between Israelis and...

How to hire voluntary helpers? We shed new light on this question by reporting a field experiment in which we invited 2,859 students to help at the 'ESA Europe 2012' conference. Invitation emails varied non-monetary and monetary incentives to convince subjects to offer help. Students could apply...