We study a fundamental conflict in economic decision-making, the trade-off between equality, equity and incentives, in a new experimental game that nests a voluntary contributions mechanism in a broader spectrum of incentive schemes. In a 2×2 design, we let subjects either vote on or...

The Annual Congress of the German Economic Association has become one of the largest national meetings of professional economists. The papers contributed at the Congress undergo a rigorous and competitive selection procedure where only about one half of all submissions are accepted for...

We set up a simple two-country model of tax competition where firms with different productivity decide in which location to produce and sell output. In this model, a unique, asymmetric Nash equilibrium is shown to exist, provided that countries are sufficiently different with respect to their...

This paper investigates the macroeconomic and welfare effects of an anticipated future switch from destination- to origin-based commodity taxation. We set up an intertemporal representative-agent model of an open economy and study especially consumption, investment, and trade-balance responses...

Managers often use tournament incentive schemes which motivate workers to compete for the top, compete to avoid the bottom, or both. In this paper we test the effectiveness and efficiency of these incentive schemes. To do so, we utilize optimal contracts in a principal-agent setting, using a...

We evaluate the incentives for strategic commodity tax-setting under destination and origin regimes when competition is imperfect and commodity taxes must be used to finance the government budget. Different cases of international duopoly are compared, where firms compete over quantities or...

We measure productivity in leading edge economic research by using data envelopment analysis (DEA) for a sample of 21 countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Publications in ten top journals of economics from 1980 to 1998 are taken as the research...

We use a simple framework where firms in two countries serve their respective domestic markets and a world market to analyse under which conditions cost-reducing mergers will be beneficial for the merging firms, the home country, and the world as a whole. For a national merger, the policies...

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