We examine the effects of leading by example in voluntary contributionexperiments. Leadership is implemented by letting one group membercontribute to the public good before followers do. Such leadershipincreases contributions in comparison to the standard voluntary contributionmechanism,...

In a stochastic duopoly market, sellers must form state-specific aspirationsexpressing how much they want to earn given their expectationsabout the other's behavior. We define individually and mutually satisficingsales behavior for given individual beliefs and aspiration profiles. In afirst...

We use a two-person linear voluntary contribution mechanism with stochastic marginal benefits from the public good to examine the effect of imperfect information on contributions levels. To assess prior risk attitudes, individual valuations of several risky prospects are elicited via a...

Even though decision-making in small teams is pervasive in business and in private life, littleis known about subjects’ preferences with respect to individual and team decision-making andabout the consequences of respecting these preferences. We report the results from anexperimental...

Leadership is important for the well-functioning of organizations. Weexamine the effects of leadership on contributions in public goods experiments.Leadership by example is implemented by letting one groupmember contribute to the public good before followers do. Such leadershipincreases...

A robust nding of repeated public goods experiments is that high initialcontribution rates sharply decline towards the end. This paper reports onan exploratory experiment designed to discover whether such a decline is simply triggered by the usual experimental practice of publicly informing...

Each of several exchange partners is the monopoly owner of a specific commoditywhich she can share with others. It is optimal to keep the own endowment, but allwould gain by mutual gift exchange. Participants play the game repeatedly in constantgroups (partner design) and can establish stable...

We examine the influence of team size on decision making in a beauty-contest experiment.Teams with four members outperform teams with two members and single personssignificantly, whereas the latter two types of decision makers do not differ.

We present a model where compensation within a workteam is determinedendogenously by the use of a rank-order tournament. Team memberscompete in their efforts for the right to propose the distribution of a prizewithin the team. The implementation of a proposal requires the approvalof other team...

Economics has devoted little attention so far as to whether the type of decision maker matters for economic decisions. However, many important decisions like those on monetary policy or a company’s business strategy are made by (small) groups rather than an individual. We compare behaviour of...