Mediation is a popular process to prevent conflicts over common resources, but there is little clean insight into its effectiveness and mechanisms. Our experimental approach allows for a comprehensive analysis of third-party intervention into potential conflicts and circumvents key problems...

This paper uses experimental data to analyze how competitive behavior is influenced by coaching and peer observation. We study behavior in a sequential contest, considering information about the effort level of subjects in other contests (observation of peers) and information about the...

We provide experimental evidence on how unequal access to performance enhancing education affects demand for redistribution. People earn money in a real effort experiment and can then decide how to distribute it among themselves and another subjects. We compare situations in which randomly...

Tournaments require a large gap in prizes in order to induce incentives. The resulting unequal distribution suggests that monetary payoffs are not the only motive that determines agents’ decisions. In our experiment we test theoretical predictions about the role of envy and loss aversion in...

We analyze educational institutions’ incentives to set up demanding or lax curricula in duopolistic markets for education with endogenous enrolment of students. We assume that there is a positive externality from student achievement to the local economy. Comparing the case of regulated tuition...

In intergroup contests a manager advises and motivates her group’s members. Her rewards often depend on the subsequent contest expenditure of the members. I test whether such incentives undermine the credibility and effectiveness of a manager’s efforts. In the different experimental...

We investigate the welfare implications of unfair incentive contracts in comparison with interactions without contracts. Reciprocal people should cooperate conditionally in the latter situation but punish unfairness by non-cooperation. We confirm that some people do cooperate conditionally in a...