When groups face difficult problems, the voices of experts may be lost in the noise of others' contributions. We present results from a "naturally noisy" setting, a large first-year undergraduate class, in which the expert's voice was "lost" to such a degree that bringing forward even more...

Psychologists claim that being treated kindly puts individuals in a positive emotional state: they then treat an unrelated third party more kindly. Numerous experiments document that subjects indeed ‘pay forward’ specific behavior. For example, they are less generous after having experienced...

Psychologists claim that being treated kindly puts individuals in a positive emotional state: they then treat an unrelated third party more kindly. Numerous experiments document that subjects indeed 'pay forward' specific behavior. For example, they are less generous after having experienced...

A standard hidden information model is considered to study the influence of the a priori productivity distribution on the optimal contract. A priori more productive (hazard rate dominant) agents work less, enjoy lower rents, but generate a higher expected surplus.

Incentives often fail in inducing economic agents to engage in a desirableactivity; implementability is restricted. What restricts implementability?When does re-organization help to overcome this restriction?This paper shows that any restriction of implementabilityis caused by an identification...

Individuals exhibit a randomization preference if they prefer random mix-tures of two bets to each of the involved bets. Such preferences provide thefoundation of various models of uncertainty aversion. However, it has to ourknowledge not been empirically investigated whether uncertainty-averse...

We investigate a team setting in which workers have different degrees of commitment to theoutcome of their work. We show that if there are complementarities in production and if theteam manager has some information about team members, interventions that the managerundertakes in order to assure...

How does the environment of an organization inuence whether workersvoluntarily provide eort? We study the power relationship betweena non-prot unit (e.g. university department, NGO, healthtrust), where workers care about the result of their work, and a bu-reaucrat, who supplies some input to the...

Consider a principal-agent relationship in which more eort by the agent raises thelikelihood of success. Does rewarding success, i.e., paying a bonus, increase eort inthis case? I nd that bonuses have not only an incentive but also an income eect.Overall, bonuses paid for success may well reduce...

Bubbles in asset markets have been documented in numerous experimentalstudies. However, all experiments in which bubbles occurpay dividends after each trading day. In this paper we study whetherbubbles can occur in markets without dividends. We investigate therole of two features that are...