In a real effort experiment with repeated competition we find striking differences in how the work effort of men and women responds to previous wins and losses. For women losing per se is detrimental to productivity, but for men a loss impacts negatively on productivity only when the prize at...

Results from two field experiments which were designed to identify possible ethnic discrimination on a German internet auction platform are discussed. A first set of results is produced by a secondary analysis of an earlier experiment. The second experiment additionally tests whether costly...

Some evidence suggests that people behave more pro-socially in small groups than in market-like situations. We construct an experiment in which people choose between allocations that affect their payoff and that of others. The choices of some participants are randomly selected to determine...

We conduct an experiment to assess the effects of different decision rules on the costs of decision making in a multilateral bargaining situation. Specifically, we compare the amount of costly delay observed in an experimental bargaining game under majority and unanimity rule. Our main finding...

The behavioral economics literature on time discounting has suggested that individuals may systematically undersave when planning for retirement. Hence, pension systems have developed to enable, or indeed force, individuals to save more for retirement. Of course, the saving aspect and the timing...

We develop a novel computerized real effort task, based on moving sliders across a screen, to test experimentally whether agents are disappointment averse when they compete in a real effort sequential-move tournament. We predict that a disappointment averse agent, who is loss averse around her...

We present two experiments designed to investigate whether individuals’ notions of distributive justice are associated with their relative (within-society) economic status. Each participant played a specially designed four-person dictator game under one of two treatments, under one initial...

Norm violations can be contagious. Previous research analyzed two mechanisms of why knowledge about others’ norm violations triggers its spread: (1) Actors lower their subjective beliefs about the probability or severity of punishment, or (2) they condition their compliance on others’...

In the last two decades, experimental papers on distributive justice have abounded. Two main results have been replicated. Firstly, there is a multiplicity of fairness rules. Secondly, fairness decisions differ depending on the context. This paper studies individual consistency in the use of...

In a laboratory experiment designed to test aspiration-based theories of happiness, McBride (2010) found no evidence of the predicted negative effect of own past payments on subjects’ satisfaction with their current round payments. This paper presents further analysis of McBride’s data that...