Whether friendship or competitive relationships deserve to be encouraged in the workplace is not obvious a priori. In this paper we derive the conditions under which a profit-aximizing employer finds it convenient to induce a rat race among workers exhibiting horizontal reciprocity in order to...

Envy is often the cause of mutually harmful outcomes. We experimentally study the impact of envy in a bargaining setting in which there is no conflict in material interests: a proposer, holding the role of residual claimant, chooses the size of the pie to be shared with a responder, whose share...

This paper presents results from an experiment designed to study the effect of self reporting risk preferences on strategy choices made in a subsequently played 2 X 2 coordination game. The main finding is that the act of answering a questionnaire about one's own risk preferences significantly...

This paper examines whether monetary incentives are an effective tool for increasing domestic waste sorting. We exploit the exogenous variation in the waste management policies experienced during the years 1999-2008 by the 95 municipalities in the district of Treviso (Italy). We estimate with a...

This paper reviews the current state of knowledge about the effect of new business formation on regional development. After a brief sketch of the origins of research on this issue, the main results of different lines of inquiry are discussed. Main issues are the development of start-up cohorts,...

For a decade, economists have been fascinated by the phenomenon of open source software (OSS). OSS is marked by free access to the software and its source code. It is developed in a public, collaborative manner by thousands of non-paid volunteers as well as profit seeking firms. Today, OSS is...

According to the accountability principle a person's fair allocation takes into account the input-relevant variables she can influence, like effort, but not the variables she cannot influence, like a randomly assigned exogenous factor. This study is based on a real effort-task experiment, where...

In this paper, we focus on the analysis of individual decision making for the formation of social networks, using experimentally generated data. We first analyse the determinants of the individual demand for links under the assumption of agents' static expectations. The results of this exercise...

The winner's curse is a well-known deviation from rational self-interest in decision-making under asymmetric information. Yet, most prominent explanations for the curse have experimentally been ruled out so far. In particular, the curse did neither seem to emanate from a lack of experience with...

In this paper we focus on proximity as one of the main determinants of international collaboration in pharmaceutical research. We use various count data specifications of the gravity model to estimate the intensity of collaboration between pairs of countries as explained by the geographical,...