Are initial competitive advantages self-reinforcing, so that markets exhibit an endogenous tendency to be dominated by only a few firms? Although this question is of great economic importance, no systematic empirical study has yet addressed it. Therefore, we examine experimentally whether firms...

Since interventions by the public sector generally commit substantial societal resources, the evaluation of effects and costs of policy interventions is imperative. This paper outlines why program evaluation should follow well-respected scientific standards and why it should be performed by...

Belief elicitation in economics experiments usually relies on paying subjects according to the accuracy of stated beliefs in addition to payments for other decisions. Such incentives, however, allow risk-averse subjects to hedge with their stated beliefs against adverse outcomes of other...

This paper analyzes data for a random sample drawn from the Dutch population who reveal their propensity to invest and reward investments in building up social capital by means of an economic experiment. We find substantial heterogeneity in the propensity to invest and in the propensity to...

In this note, we present a novel computerized real effort task based on moving sliders across a screen which overcomes many of the drawbacks of existing real effort tasks.  The task was first developed and used by us in Gill and Prowse (2009).  We outline the design of our "slider task",...

We report in this paper the result of three experiments on risk, ambiguity and time attitude. The first two differed by the population considered (students vs general population) while the third one used a different protocol and concerned students and portfolio managers. We find quite a lot of...

Previous research has extensively studied the gap between environmental or social concern, and behaviour. However, measuring environmental or social dimension valuation remains challenging. This paper therefore fills this gap by measuring fair trade and organic labels valuation, using an...

In recent years, many social scientists have claimed that trust plays an important role in economic and social transactions. Despite its proposed importance, the measurement and the definition of trust seem to be not fully settled, and the identification of the exact role of trust in economic...

This paper is an empirical study, using new experimental data, of repeated game strategies in trust games; its goal is to identify strategies that people use in repeated games. We develop a strategy inference method that maps observed actions to a set of best fitting unobserved repeated game...

This paper shows one type of asymmetric information problems, their theoretical implications, the design of contracts that mitigate them, as well as some experimental evidence. Furthermore, by extrapolating the results, the paper tries to illustrate certain macroeconomic implications obtained...