This paper provides evidence that free riders are heavily punished even if punishment is costly and does not provide any material benefits for the punisher. The more free riders negatively deviate from the group standard the more they are punished. As a consequence, the existence of an...

Many people contribute to public goods but stop doing so once they experience free riding. We test the hypothesis that groups whose members know that they are composed only of 'like-minded' cooperators are able to maintain a higher cooperation level than the most cooperative, randomly-composed...

We describe a computerized experiment which can be used to introduce students to imperfect competition in courses on Introductory Economics, Industrial Organization, and Strategy & Management. In addition to introducing students to strategic thinking in general, the experiment serves to...

In this paper we study experimentally four remedies to overcome inefficiencies that arise from the incompleteness of contracts. These remedies are reciprocity, repeated game effects, social embeddedness, and incentive contracts. In our baseline treatment we find that reciprocity is a powerful...

This paper shows that reciprocity has powerful implications for many economic domains. It is an important determinant in the enforcement of contracts and social norms and enhances the possibilities of collective action greatly. Reciprocity may render the provision of explicit incentives...

In this paper we provide experimental evidence indicating that incentive contracts may cause a strong crowding out of reciprocity-driven voluntary cooperation. This crowding out effect constitutes costs of incentive provision that have been largely neglected by economists. In our experiments the...

We study behavior within a simple principal-agent experiment. Our design allows for a large class of linear contracts. Principals can offer any feasible combination of (negative) fixed wages and incentives in the form of return sharing. This great contractual flexibility allows us to study...

Recent evidence highlights the importance of social norms in many economic relations. However, many of these relationships are long term and provide repeated game incentives for performance. We experimentally investigate interaction effects of reciprocity and repeated game incentives in two...

In this chapter we provide a selective survey of experiments to investigate the potential of social motivations in explaining labour market phenomena. We argue that laboratory experiments are a useful instrument to explore issues in labour market theory and personnel economics. Our starting...

This chapter reports the results of experiments that were designed to test the effectiveness of reciprocity as a contract enforcement device. It turns out that reciprocity generates a significant increase in effort levels relative to the prediction based on selfish preferences. Moreover, it...