The effect of objective feedback on performance is often studied, while subjective feedback is largely neglected in the economics literature. We estimate the impact of positive subjective feedback - encouragement and praise - on effort and performance, and compare the effect by gender. We use a...

Communication has been regarded as one of the most effective devices in promoting team cooperation. But asymmetric communication sometimes breeds collusion and is detrimental to team efficiency. Here, we present experimental evidence showing that excluding one member from team communication...

Online labor markets provide new opportunities for behavioral research, but conducting economic experiments online raises important methodological challenges. This particularly holds for interactive designs. In this paper, we provide a methodological discussion of the similarities and...

Individual willingness to enter competitive environments predicts career choices and labor market outcomes. Meanwhile, many people experience competitive contexts as stressful. We use two laboratory experiments to investigate whether factors related to stress can help explain individual...

Cash is an important means of transaction, generally assumed to be fungible. However, behavioral economics and consumer research show that ‘cash in hand’, physically holding on to cash and then handing it away, affects purchasing decisions. I study how cash in hand influences decisions in a...

We examine 434 estimates of the individual discount rate reported in 27 published studies. The estimates vary substantially across studies with reported mean at the value of 0.4. We detect presence of selective reporting in the discounting literature using a meta-analytical methods. Our results...

We investigate the relationship between anchoring and the emergence of bubbles in experimental asset markets. We show that setting a visual anchor at the fundamental value (FV) in the first period only is sufficient to eliminate or to significantly reduce bubbles in laboratory asset markets. If...

Do politico-economic systems influence how control affects motivation? We hypothesize that control aversion, meaning crowding-out of intrinsic motivation due to enforcement, has evolved less under the coercive regime of East Germany than under the liberal regime of West Germany. We test this...

This study focuses on luck as a source of inequality, including (1) sheer luck and (2) luck that correlates with individual characteristics, such as gender and ethnicity. While the former is more random, the latter is more discriminatory. A strand of previous literature treats luck more...

In stated preference literature, the tendency to choose the alternative representing the status quo situation seems to exceed real life status quo effects. Accordingly, status quo bias can be a problem. In Choice Experiments, status quo bias is found to be strongly correlated with protest...