We study experimentally how taxpayers choose between two tax regimes to fund a public good. The first-best tax regime imposes a general, distorsion-free income tax. However, this tax cannot be enforced. The second-best alternative supplements the income tax by a specific commodity tax. This tax...

Systematic experiments with distribution games (for a survey, see Roth, 1995) have shown that participants are strongly motivated by fairness and efficiency considerations. This evidence, however, results mainly from experimental designs asking directly for sharing monetary rewards. But even...

This paper describes the video laboratory at the Max Planck Institute for Research into Economic Systems in Jena. The idea is to give the experiment designer an overview on the functionality of the video laboratory, to provide the first time user a quick overview of the control system and preset...

Many decisions in economics and finance have to be made under severe time pressure. Furthermore, payoffs frequently depend on the speed of decision-making, like, for instance, when buying and selling stocks. In this paper, we examine the influence of time pressure and time-dependent incentive...

Each of several exchange partners is the monopoly owner of a specific commodity which she can share with others. It is optimal to keep the own endowment, but all would gain by mutual gift exchange. Participants play the game repeatedly in constant groups (partner design) and can establish stable...

This paper investigates factors influencing individual portfolio allocations with particular focus on the role of illusion of control. By forming their portfolio of two risky lotteries and one risk-less alternative, subjects are requested to reach a target investment profit, whereby equal...

It is commonly accepted that face-to-face communication induces cooperation. The experiment disentangles communication and social effect (replication of Roth, 1995) and examines the components of the social effect with the help of unilateral communication. Results suggest that separate...

Economics has devoted little attention so far as to whether the type of decision maker matters for economic decisions. However, many important decisions like those on monetary policy or a company's business strategy are made by (small) groups rather than an individual. We compare behaviour of...

The price mecanism is the primary means of information transfer in decentralized economic systems. High prices indicate high demand, whereas low prices indicate low demand. Thus prices are the signals for accelerating or slowing production. However, using sequential, multi-unit auctions, we show...

We study the value of information in financial markets by asking whether having more information always leads to higher returns. We address this question in an experiment where single traders have different information levels about an asset's intrinsic value. In our treatments we vary the nature...