Policies and explicit private incentives designed for self-regarding individuals sometimes are less effective or even counterproductive when they diminish altruism, ethical norms and other social preferences. Evidence from 51 experimental studies indicates that this crowding out effect is...

In this paper we conduct a laboratory experiment to test the extent to which Moore and Repullo’s subgame perfect implementation mechanism induces truth-telling in practice, both in a setting with perfect information and in a setting where buyers and sellers face a small amount of uncertainty...

The assumption that payoff-relevant information is observable but not verifiable is important for many core results in contract, organizational and institutional economics. However, subgame-perfect implementation (SPI) mechanisms - which are based on off-equilibrium arbitration clauses that...

We study a situation where two players first choose a sharing rule, then invest into a joint production process, and then split joint benefits. We investigate how social preferences determine investments. In our experiment we find that even the materially disadvantaged player cares more for...

Can formal contracts help resolving the holdup problem? We address this important question by studying the holdup problem in repeated transactions between a seller and a buyer in which the seller can make relation-specific investments in each period. In contrast to previous findings, we...

Employment contracts give a principal the authority to decide flexibly which task his agent should execute. However, there is a tradeoff, first pointed out by Simon (1951), between flexibility and employer moral hazard. An employment contract allows the principal to adjust the task quickly to...

Contributing to a social cause can be an important driver for workers in the public and non-profit sector as well as in firms that engage in Corporate Philanthropy or other Corporate Social Responsibility policies. This paper compares the effectiveness of social incentives - that take the form...

The corporate finance literature documents that managers tend to overinvest into physical assets. A number of theoretical contributions have aimed to explain this stylized fact, most of them focussing on a fundamental agency problem between shareholders and managers. The present paper shows that...

Existing theories of a firm’s optimal capital structure seem to fail in explaining why many healthy and profitable firms rely heavily on equity financing, even though benefits associated with debt (like tax shields) appear to be high and the bankruptcy risk low. This holds in particular for...

We analyze the long-term effects of firm break-up and ownership change on corporate performance. Our analysis is based on a unique data set for a large number of Czech firms spanning the period 1996–2005. We employ a propensity score matching procedure to deal with endogeneity problems. Our...