Recent experimental literature in labor economics shows that fairness concerns make a substantial difference for working decisions. Our study systematically explores how the existence of multiple fairness foci influences wage setting and acceptance thresholds. Particularly, we focus on the...

Laboratory experiments by Fudenberg and Pathak (2010), and Vyrastekova, Funaki and Takeuch (2008) show that punishment is able to sustain cooperation in groups even when it is observed only in the end of the interaction sequence. Our results demonstrate that the real power of unobserved...

Carpenter and Matthews (2009) examine the cooperation norms determining people's punishment behavior in a social-dilemma game. Their findings are striking: absolute norms outperform the relative norms commonly regarded as the determinants of punishment. Using multiple punishment stages and...

Broken Windows: the metaphor has changed New York and Los Angeles. Yet it is far from un-disputed whether the broken windows policy was causal for reducing crime. In a series of lab experiments we put two components of the theory to the test. We show that first impressions and early punishment...

This article reports on a field study that has been conducted in the online computer game World of Warcraft. In a basic labor situation a principal gives an upfront wage to an agent (who is unaware that he is participating in an experiment) and asks him to conduct a real-effort task. The unique...

This article tests experimentally whether a high degree of collusion on advertisement expenditures facilitate tacit price collusion in duopoly markets. Two environments are tested, in which the size of the spillover between advertising expenditures is varied. The results show that the...

This article reports the results of a simple bargaining experiment on the ultimatum-revenge game. The game enables to differentiate between fairness that is stimulated by intentional based motives, distributional motives, and fairness considerations that mix both motives. The laboratory...

This paper experimentally investigates the nature of impulses in impulse learning. Particularly, we analyze whether positive feedback (i.e., yielding a superior payo in a game) or negative feedback (i.e., yielding an inferior payo in a game) leads to a systematic change in the individual...

This paper explores potential endowment effects of contractual default rules. For this purpose, we analyze the Hadley liability default clause in a model of bilateral bargaining of lotteries against safe options. The liability default clause determines the right for the safe payoff option. We...

We report an experiment designed to test the influence of noisy commitments on efficiency in a simple bargaining game. We investigate two different levels of commitment reliability in a variant of the peasant-dictator game. Theoretical analysis suggests that the reliability of commitments in...