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...

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,...

This paper introduces and discusses an idea which minimizes gaming or manipulation activities, if payments are linked to results from manipulative methods. The idea is to add nonmanipulable information to manipulable information to improve the evaluation of a given output. A score declining in...

Many European universities face demands to provide excellent education and to enrol more students at the same time. With scarce financial resources policy makers concentrate on regulations (especially admission policies, tuition fees, and the introduction of competition) to meet the different...

The paper contributes to the literature on ability grouping in schools by taking student incentives into account. Education provides both a signal on unobservable ability and improves productivity after education. Sorting sets better incentives in primary education and allows for improved peer...

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...

A small lie appears trivial but it obviously violates moral commandments. We analyze whether the preference for others’ truth telling is absolute or depends on the size of a lie. In a laboratory experiment we compare punishment for different sizes of lies controlling for the resulting economic...

Social preferences explain competitive behavior between agents and reciprocity towards a principal but there is no insight into the interaction of competition and reciprocity. We conducted a laboratory experiment with two treatments to address this issue. In a conventional tournament, an agent...

We present results from a field experiment at Swiss high schools in which we compare the effectiveness of a classroom experiment against conventional economics teaching. We randomly assigned classes into different teaching environments or a control group. Our results suggest that both teaching...