Economics has devoted little attention to whether the type of decision maker matters for economic decisions. However, many important decisions like those on monetary policy or a company's business strategy are made by (small) groups rather than an individual. We compare behaviour of individuals...

We test for behavioral differences between groups and individuals in gift-exchange experiments. Related studies establish group behavior as typically closer to the game-theoretic equilibrium. We show that this result may depend crucially on the decision making procedure within groups. A novel...

We show in a public goods experiment on three continents that conditional cooperation is a universal behavioral regularity. Yet, the number of conditional cooperators and the extent of conditional cooperation are much higher in the U.S.A. than anywhere else.

We study the influence of gender and gender pairing on economic decision making in an experimental two-person bargaining game where the other party?s gender is known to both actors. We find that (1) gender per se has no significant effect on behavior, whereas (2) gender pairing systematically...

The effects of a Tobin tax on foreign exchange markets have long been disputed. We present an experiment with currency trading on two markets, where either none, one, or both markets are taxed. Our results confirm the hitherto undisputed issues: a tax reduces trading volume, shifts market share...

We study experimentally the relationship between intra-firm wage dispersion chosen by principals and workers' performance. Principals show a preference for more egalitarian wage schemes, and workers are negatively influenced by high levels of wage inequality.

We study the effects of communication in an experimental tournament between teams. When teams, rather than individuals, compete for a prize there is a need for intra-team coordination in order to win the inter-team competition. Introducing communication in such situations may have ambiguous...

We study the impact of advice or observation on the depth of reasoning in an experimental beauty-contest game. Both sources of information trigger faster convergence to the equilibrium. Yet, we find that subjects who receive naive advice outperform uninformed subjects permanently, whereas...

We study whether information about imminent future dividends can abate bubbles in experimental asset markets. Using the seminal design of Smith et al. (1988) we find that markets where traders are asymmetrically informed about future dividends have smaller, and shorter, bubbles than markets with...