Because costly punishment is not credible, subgame perfection suggests that punishment will not deter free riding, regardless of the size or structure of groups. However, experiments show that people will punish free riders, even at considerable cost. To examine the implications of agents who...

This paper looks at how the reputation of a monetary policy making committee is jointly determined with the reputations of its individual members. I ask whether individuals have more or less incentive to gain a reputation for being tough on inflation when they are part of a group. I examine the...

Ad-hoc contracting allows to quickly react to changes which could be neglected or noticed too late in case of constant contracting. But always deciding anew, e.g., how much and what to order in commercial and what to buy in private life, is too cumbersome. To capture the cognitive burden of...

Trust is essential to many daily exchanges, wherein a trustor sometimes decides to be vulnerable to an individual or other times to a group. Although a trustor may trust an individual more or less than a group, this topic has been underexplored. We therefore examine whether people are more...

Many important intertemporal decisions are made by groups rather than individuals. What happens to collective decisions when there is internal conflict about the tradeoff between present and future has not been thoroughly investigated so far. We study experimentally the causal effect of group...

The purpose of central bank minutes is to give an account of monetary policy meeting discussions to outside observers, thereby enabling them to draw informed conclusions about future policy. However, minutes are by necessity a shortened and edited representation of a broader discussion....

Participatory work structure is a popular concept but its causal impacts in real world work groups have heretofore been unquantified and research has been Western-centric. We test the hypothesis that participatory group structure increases productivity for blue collar workers in a context where...