Think tanks and political leaders have raised concerns about the implications that the Covid-19 response and reconstruction might have on other social objectives that were setting the international agenda before the Covid-19 pandemic. We present experimental evidence for eight consecutive weeks...

We study cooperation in an environment where public good providers face the decision to accept a newcomer to their group. A bottom-up process for accepting new members to social groups reveals individual preferences to include newcomers. Alternatively, inclusion can be decided in a top-down...

In markets for credence goods - such as health care or repair services - fraudulent behavior by better informed experts is a common problem. Our model studies how four common features shape experts' provision behavior in credence goods markets: (i) diagnostic uncertainty of experts; (ii)...

Credence goods markets are prone to fraudulent behavior and market inefficiencies due to informational asymmetries between sellers and customers. We examine experimentally the effects of diagnostic uncertainty and insurance coverage on the information acquisition and provision decisions by...

Extensive evidence from laboratory experiments indicates that many individuals are willing to use costly punishment to enforce social norms, even in one-shot interactions. However, there appears to be little evidence in the literature of such behavior in the field. We study the propensity to...

Tournaments are widely used in organizations, explicitly or implicitly, to reward the best-performing employees, e.g., through promotion or bonuses, and to punish the worst-performing employees, e.g., through firing or unfavorable job assignments. We use a principal-agent model to compare the...

We study experimentally the protection of property in five widely distinct countries-Austria, Mexico, Mongolia, South Korea and the United States. Our main results are that the security of property varies with experimental institutions, and that our subject pools exhibit significantly different...

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

This paper studies how income tax rates are determined and how they are related to government corruption in the form of fund capture. A model is presented where rich voters can block redistribution by buying the votes of some poor voters. In equilibrium there is only limited redistribution and...

Many tournaments are plagued by sabotage among competitors. Typically, sabotage is welfare-reducing, but from an individual's perspective an attractive alternative to exerting positive effort. Yet, given its illegal and often immoral nature, sabotage is typically hidden, making it difficult to...