Mediation is a popular process to prevent conflicts over common resources, but there is little clean insight into its effectiveness and mechanisms. Our experimental approach allows for a comprehensive analysis of third-party intervention into potential conflicts and circumvents key problems...

In many groups heterogeneous incentives induce people to make unequal contributions to a common pool. This paper studies whether people consider the random assignment of such unequal incentives as unequal opportunities and demand more egalitarian distributions of the pool. The aggregate...

This paper uses experimental data to analyze how competitive behavior is influenced by coaching and peer observation. We study behavior in a sequential contest, considering information about the effort level of subjects in other contests (observation of peers) and information about the...

In intergroup contests a manager advises and motivates her group’s members. Her rewards often depend on the subsequent contest expenditure of the members. I test whether such incentives undermine the credibility and effectiveness of a manager’s efforts. In the different experimental...

We provide experimental evidence on how unequal access to performance enhancing education affects demand for redistribution. People earn money in a real effort experiment and can then decide how to distribute it among themselves and another subjects. We compare situations in which randomly...

The paper presents experimental evidence on the impact of managers and their incentives on the behavior of group members in intergroup contests. I find that members follow the nonbinding investment recommendations of their group manager in particular if the managers payoff does not depend on the...

Many scholars argue that the delegation of decision rights to independent institutions promotes trust and specific investments. We test this conjecture with variations of the trust game in which the back transfer decision is delegated to a third party. A randomly chosen third party with a fixed...

People do not like to delegate the distribution of favors. To explain this reluctance we disentangle reward motives in an experiment, in which an investor can directly transfer money to a trustee or delegate this decision to another investor. Varying the transfer values of investor and delegate,...

Tournaments require a large gap in prizes in order to induce incentives. The resulting unequal distribution suggests that monetary payoffs are not the only motive that determines agents’ decisions. In our experiment we test theoretical predictions about the role of envy and loss aversion in...

We analyze educational institutions’ incentives to set up demanding or lax curricula in duopolistic markets for education with endogenous enrolment of students. We assume that there is a positive externality from student achievement to the local economy. Comparing the case of regulated tuition...