Filing income tax returns or insurance claims often requires that individuals comply with complex rules to meet their obligations. We present evidence from a laboratory tax experiment suggesting that the effects of complexity on compliance are intrinsically linked to distributive fairness. We...

Filing income tax returns or insurance claims often requires that individuals comply with complex rules to meet their obligations. We present evidence from a laboratory tax experiment suggesting that the effects of complexity on compliance are intrinsically linked to distributive fairness. We...

We test whether markets are needed to mitigate the effects of anchoring on peoples' pref- erences. We anchor subjects by asking them if they are willing to sell a bottle of wine for a transparently uninformative random price. We elicit subjects' Willingness-To-Accept for the bottle before and...

From a normative perspective the order in which evidence is presented should not bias legal judgment. Yet psychological research on how individuals process conflicting evidence sug-gests that order could matter. The evidence shows that decision-makers dissolve ambiguity by forging coherence....

Using a representative sample of the German adult population, this paper investigates the extent to which a survey measure of present bias predicts present-biased choice behavior in incentive-compatible experiments and real-world outcomes related to in-vestments in financial assets and human...

The author reports results from controlled laboratory experiments on the Laffer curve. Apart from studying the existence of the Laffer curve under exogenous taxation, he explores framing effects, productivity differences under the strategic method and the direct method, and cultural differences....

We study time preferences by means of a longitudinal lab experiment involving both monetary and non-monetary rewards (leisure). Our novel design allows to measure whether participants prefer to anticipate or delay gratification, without imposing any structural assumption on the instantaneous...

This paper uses laboratory experiments to study subjects’ assessment of uncertainty resulting from strategic and non-strategic decisions of other players. Nonstrategic events are defined by the colors of balls drawn from urns, whereas strategic events are defined by the action choice in Stag...

Arguably, for many citizens the perceived expected disutility from sanctions is smaller than the monetary gain from tax evasion. Nevertheless most people pay their taxes most of the time. In a lab experiment, we show that the willingness to pay taxes even absent enforcement is indeed pronounced....

Whether pro-social preferences identified in economic laboratories survive in natural market contexts is an important and contested issue. We investigate how fairness in a laboratory experiment framed explicitly as a market exchange relates to preferences for fair trade products before and after...