The population of most developed societies is ‘graying’. As life expectancy increases and the large baby-boom generation approaches retirement age, this has critical consequences for maintaining a high standard of living and the sustainability of pension systems. In the light of these...

We devise an experiment to explore the effect of different degrees of competition on optimal contracts in a hidden-information context. In our benchmark case, each principal is matched with one agent of unknown type. In our second treatment, a principal can select one of three agents, while in a...

Evidence of Illusion of Control - the fact that people believe to have control over pure chance events - is a recurrent finding in experimental psychology. Results in economics find instead little to no support. In this paper we test whether this dissonant result across disciplines is due to the...

Evidence of Illusion of Control – the fact that people believe to have control over pure chance events – is a recurrent finding in experimental psychology. Results in economics find instead little to no support. In this paper we test whether this dissonant result across disciplines is due to...

We experimentally examine how the incentive to defect in a social dilemma affects conditional cooperation. In our first study we conduct online experiments in which subjects play eight Sequential Prisoner's Dilemma games with payoffs systematically varied across games. We find that few second...

The prisoner's dilemma (PD) is arguably the most important model of social dilemmas, but our knowledge about how a PD's material payoff structure affects cooperation is incomplete. In this paper we investigate the effect of variation in material payoffs on cooperation, focusing on one-shot PD...

In recent years a large number of experimental studies have documented the existence of strong reciprocity among humans. Strong reciprocity means that people willingly repay gifts and punish the violation of cooperation and fairness norms even in anonymous one-shot encounters with genetically...

Recent bargaining experiments demonstrated an impact of anonymity and incomplete information on subjects' behavior. This has rekindled the question whether fair behavior is inspired by regard for others or is explained by external forces. To test for the importance of external pressure we...

This paper studies the causal effect of status differences on moral disengagement and violence. To measure violent behavior, in the experiment, a subject can inflict a painful electric shock on another subject in return for money. We exogenously vary relative status in the realm of sexual...

If individual abilities are imperfectly observable, statistical discrimination may affect hiring decisions. In our lab experiment, pairs of subjects solve simple mathematical problems. Subjects then hire others to perform similar tasks. Before choosing whom to hire, they receive information...