Human communication in organizations often involves a large amount of gossiping about others. Here we study in an experiment whether gossip affects the efficiency of human interactions. We let subjects play a trust game. Third parties observe a trustee's behavior and can gossip about it by...

Non-homogeneous regression is often used to statistically post-process ensemble forecasts. Usually only ensemble forecasts of the predictand variable are used as input but other potentially useful information sources are ignored. Although it is straightforward to add further input variables,...

Measurement invariance is a fundamental assumption in item response theory models, where the relationship between a latent construct (ability) and observed item responses is of interest. Violation of this assumption would render the scale misinterpreted or cause systematic bias against certain...

It is conjectured that one of the major ingredients of historic financial bubbles was the inflow of money in various forms. We run 36 laboratory asset markets and investigate the joint effect of cash inflow and trading horizon on price efficiency. We show that only markets with cash inflow and...

Flexible spatio-temporal models are widely used to create reliable and accurate estimates for precipitation climatologies. Most models are based on square root transformed monthly or annual means, where a normal distribution seems to be appropriate. This assumption becomes invalid on a daily...

To post-process ensemble predictions to a particular location, often statistical methods are used, especially in complex terrain such as the Alps. When expanded to several stations, the post-processing has to be repeated at every station individually thus losing information about spatial...

According to the theory of guilt aversion, agents suffer a psychological cost whenever they fall short of other people's expectations. In this paper we suggest that there may be limits to this kind of motivation. We present evidence from an experimental dictator game showing that dictators...

Affirmative action rules are often implemented to promote women on labor markets. Little is known, however, about how and whether such rules emerge endogenously in groups of potentially affected subjects. We experimentally investigate whether subjects vote for affirmative action rules, against,...

Recursive partitioning techniques are established and frequently applied for exploring unknown structures in complex and possibly high-dimensional data sets. The methods can be used to detect interactions and nonlinear structures in a data-driven way by recursively splitting the predictor space...

Reciprocation of monetary gifts is well-understood in economics. In contrast, there is little research on reciprocal behavior following immaterial gifts like compliments. We close this gap and investigate how employees reciprocate after receiving immaterial and material gifts. We purchase (1)...