We explore whether natural human competitiveness can be exploited to stimulate charitable giving in a controlled laboratory experiment involving three different treatments of a sequential “dictator game.” Without disclosing the actual amounts given and kept, in each period players are publicly ranked — by the amount they give away, by the amount they keep for themselves, or spuriously. Our resu...

Can Contracts Signal Social Norms? Experimental Evidence We investigate whether incentive schemes signal social norms and thus affect behavior beyond their direct economic consequences. A principal-agent experiment is studied in which prior to contract choice principals are informed about past actions of other agents and thus have more information about “norms of behavior”. Compared to a settin...

We present an experimental study on the wasted resources associated with tax evasion. This waste arises from taxpayers and tax authorities, investing costly effort in concealment, respectively detection, of tax evasion. We show that (socially inefficient) efforts depend positively on the prevailing tax rate, but not on the fine which is imposed in case of detected tax evasion. The frequency of ...

Incentives and Group Identity This paper investigates in a principal-agent environment whether and how group membership influences the effectiveness of incentives and when incentives can have “hidden costs”, i.e., a detrimental effect. We show experimentally that in all interactions control mechanisms can have hidden costs for reasons specific to group membership. In within-group interactions c...

This paper reconsiders experimental tests of the English clock auction. We point out why the standard procedure can only use a small subset of all bids, which gives rise to a selection bias. We propose an alternative yet equivalent format that makes all bids visible, and apply it to a “wallet auction” experiment. Finally, we test the theory against various alternative hypotheses, and compare th...

Although weather has been shown to affect financial markets and financial decision making, a still open question is the channel through which such influence is exerted. By employing a multiple price list method, this paper provides direct experimental evidence that sunshine and good weather promote risk-taking behavior. This effect is present whether relying on objective measures of meteorologi...

We consider a dynamic macroeconomic model with households that regard relative affluence as social status. The measure of relative affluence can be the ratio to, or the difference from, the social average. The two specifications lead to quite different results: with the ratio specification full employment is necessarily realized, whereas with the difference specification persistent shortages of...

This paper investigates the reasoning process in unprecedented strategic situations. It proposes a new experimental design that allows to obtain an incentivised, written account of individual reasoning. Those reveal that the reasoning of the large majority of participants is structured as conjectured by the level-k model. We estimate that around one third of the participants play non-strategica...

One-shot interaction and repeated interaction often co-exist in the real world. We study possible behavioral effects of this co-existence in a principal-agent setting, in which a principal simultaneously employs a permanent and a temporary agent. Our experimental results indicate that there is “discrimination” between the two agents and that the available information for agents determines the e...

This paper tests whether the 2003 dividend tax cut—one of the largest reforms ever to a US capital tax rate—stimulated corporate investment and increased labor earnings, using a quasi-experimental design and US corporate tax returns from years 1996–2008. I estimate that the tax cut caused zero change in corporate investment and employee compensation. Economically, the statistical precision chal...