Advice is a powerful means to improve peoples' judgments and decisions. Because advice quality is rarely apparent, decision-makers must infer it from the characteristics of the advisor or the advice itself. Here, we focus on a largely neglected advice characteristic that should signal quality:...

Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on...

This paper analyses the Relative Age Effect (RAE) in German elite youth soccer academies. We examine the efficiency of talent selection and the returns to training. Our results indicate a strong effect of players' birth dates on their probability of getting selected - and, thus, a waste of...

This paper constitutes the first economic investigation into the potential detrimental role of smartphones in the workplace based on a field experiment. We exploit the conduct of a nationwide telephone survey, for which interviewers were recruited to work individually and in single offices for...

This paper investigates the influence of the political regime on the relative importance of conspicuous consumption. We use the separation of Germany into the communist GDR and the democratic FRG and its reunification in 1990 as a natural experiment. Relying on household data that are...

This paper analyzes experimentally how the interaction of task meaning and peer presence affects work effort. We build on the experimental designs of Falk and Ichino (2006) and Ariely et al. (2008). Confirming previous results from the literature, we find positive peer effects and negative...

We test concerns for relative standing with respect to private consumption, income, leisure, savings, and personal characteristics, using data from a classroom survey. Our results show highest degrees of positionality for personal characteristics and income. In order to explain positionality, we...

We conduct a classroom survey to investigate the willingness to sacrifice consumption in absolute terms in order to ascend above others in terms of consumption levels. In contrast to other studies using survey methodologies, participants are divided into a treatment and a control group. This...

An old soccer myth states that teams affected by a sending-off perform better than they would have without the penalty. Using economic theory, we analyze the course of a soccer match after a sending-off and test our hypotheses using data from the German Bundesliga from 1999 to 2009. The results...

This paper shows that households with positional concerns and convex status utility use gambling to attempt leapfrogging in the social hierarchy. We test this theoretical prediction relying on household data that is representative for Germany, proxying the status orientation of households by...