We analyze competition between workers in a gift-exchange experiment where two workers are hired by the same employer. In the competition treatment the two employees simultaneously choose their effort whereas in the baseline treatment competition cannot occur since there is only one employee per...

This paper studies motivational crowding-out effects after financial incentives are lowered. In a real-effort setting, workers receive a piece rate before financial incentives are substituted by a one-time payment. Under the fixed payment, effort is significantly lower only when preceded by...

In this paper, we discuss learning behavior and the heterogeneity of subjects' ability to perform in real-effort tasks. Afterwards, we present a novel variant of Erkal et al.'s (2011) encryption real-effort task which aims to minimize learning behavior in repeated settings. In the task,...

We experimentally analyze a lemons market with a labor-market framing. Sellers are referred to as “workers” and have the possibility to provide “employers” with costly but credible information about their “productivity”. Economic theory suggests that in this setup, unraveling takes...

This paper experimentally studies the disposition effects of teams and individuals. The disposition effect describes the phenomenon that investors are reluctant to realize losses, whereas winners are sold too early. Our experiments compare the investments of two-person teams to a setting where...

This paper analyzes in a within-subjects experiment time preferences when peopledecide for themselves and on behalf of others. The data show that subjects becomemore impatient when making decisions, which affect the payoff of others. Thechange can be explained by altruistic subjects who increase...

We study the role of norm violations and learning behavior in multi- and single-worker gift-exchange games and find that working with co-workers leads to a twofold effect. First, flexible wages yield moderately higher efforts than in the single-employee treatment. The data suggests that this is...