This paper presents new evidence on the distribution of risk attitudes in the population, using a novel set of survey questions and a representative sample of roughly 22,000 individuals living in Germany. Using a question that asks about willingness to take risks in general, on an 11-point...

This paper presents new evidence on the distribution of risk attitudes in the population, using a novel set of survey questions and a representative sample of roughly 22,000 individuals living in Germany. Using a question that asks about willingness to take risks in general, on an 11-point...

Economic analyses of asymmetric information typically start with the assumption that individuals know more about their own characteristics than outside observers. This assumption implies that individuals can accurately assess their own competence in a given domain. However, individuals can only...

Recent policy initiatives offer cash payments to children (and often their families) to induce better health and educational choices. These policies implicitly assume that children are especially impatient (i.e., have high discount rates); however, little is known about the nature of children's...

Models of job tournaments and competitive workplaces more generally predict that while individual effort may increase as competition intensifies between workers, the incentive for workers to cooperate with each other diminishes. We report on a field experiment conducted with workers from a...

In November 2001, 5,558 readers of the German weekly Die Zeit participated in a three-person ultimatum experiment involving a proposer X, a responder Y, and a dummy Z (Guth and van Damme, 1998). A proposal is a vector (x,y,z) with x + y + z = DM 1,200, and x in {0, 200, 400, 600, 800, 1000}, and...

We present results from a field experiment testing the gift-exchange hypothesis inside a tree-planting firm paying its workforce incentive contracts. Firm managers told a crew of tree planters they would receive a pay raise for one day as a result of a surplus not attributable to past planting...