We take issue with claims that the funding mix of banks, which makes them fragile and crisisprone, is efficient because it reflects special liquidity benefits of bank debt. Even aside from neglecting the systemic damage to the economy that banks' distress and default cause, such claims are...

Individuals often have to decide to which degree of risk they want to expose others, or how much risk to accept if their choice has an externality on third parties. One typical application is a household. We run an experiment in the German Socio-Economic Panel with two members from 494...

Framing influences choice. However, little is known about the underlying mechanisms behind framing effects. We study gain-loss framing in binary modified dictator games. Subjects choose the selfish option more often in the loss frame compared to the gain frame. Recording visual fixations with...

Narratives pervade almost any aspect of our life and play a particularly important role in moral and prosocial decision-making. We study how positive (stories in favor of a prosocial action) and negative (stories in favor of a selfish action) narratives influence prosocial behavior. Our main...

Group tasks are often organized by a list: group members state their willingness to contribute by entering their names on a publicly visible, empty list. Alternatively, one could organize the group task by starting with a full list: every group member is already entered on the list and...

Behavioral law and economics applies the conceptual tools of behavioral economics to the analysis of legal problems and legal intervention. These models, and the experiments to test them, assume an institution free state of nature. In modern societies, the law’s subjects never see this state...

We present an online experiment in which we investigate the impact of perceived social acceptability on online hate speech, and measure the causal effect of specific interventions. We compare two types of interventions: counter-speaking (informal verbal sanctions) and censoring (deleting hateful...

Economic preferences - like time, risk and social preferences - have been shown to be very influential for real-life outcomes, such as educational achievements, labor market outcomes, or health status. We contribute to the recent literature that has examined how and when economic preferences are...

This paper explores the impact of debarment as a deterrent of collusion in first-price procurement auctions. We develop a procurement auction model where bidders can form bidding rings, and derive the bidding and collusive behavior under no sanction, debarment and fines. The model's predictions...

Behavioral law and economics applies the conceptual tools of behavioral economics to the analysis of legal problems and legal intervention. These models, and the experiments to test them, assume an institution free state of nature. In modern societies, the law's subjects never see this state of...