Increasing inequality and associated egalitarian sentiments have again put redistribution on the political agenda. Other-regarding preferences may also affect support for redistribution, but knowledge about their distribution in the broader population and how they are associated with political...

This chapter summarizes main findings of five experimental studies. These studies were primarily designed to test the fair wageeffort hypothesis in the context of competitive experimental markets. The fair wageeffort hypothesis stipulates that wage increases raise workers' effort levels. Facing...

We review the vast literature on social preferences by assessing what is known about their fundamental properties, their distribution in the broader population, and their consequences for important economic and political behaviors. We provide, in particular, an overview of the empirically...

Throughout human history, informal sanctions played a key role in the enforcement of social norms and the provision of public goods. However, a considerable body of evidence suggests that informal peer sanctions often cause large efficiency costs. This raises the question whether alternative...

The assumption that payoff-relevant information is observable but not verifiable is important for many core results in contract, organizational and institutional economics. However, subgame-perfect implementation (SPI) mechanisms – which are based on off-equilibrium arbitration clauses that...

The fundamental question addressed in this research is the degree to which models of optimal intertemporal choice are good descriptions of non-interactive individual intertemporal behavior in the presence of habit formation. The existence of loss avoidance does, however, not explain why subjects...

This chapter reports on two experiments that were designed to test whether efficiency wage theories receive support in the laboratory. The idea is that theories which have no explanatory power even under the controlled circumstances of the laboratory, will not apply to the much more complicated...

The evidence suggests that relational contracting and legal rules play an important role in credit markets but on the basis of the prevailing field data it is difficult to pin down their causal impact. Here we show experimentally that relational incentives are a powerful causal determinant for...