Whether incentive contracts perform better than trust in terms of productiveefficiency is usually explored by principal-agent experiments (mostinvolving only one agent). We investigate this issue in the context of athree-person ultimatum experiment, which is simpler and more neutrallyframed than...

One-shot interaction and repeated interaction often co-exist in the real world. We study possible behavioral effects of this co-existence in a principal-agent setting, in which a principal simultaneously employs a permanent and a temporary agent. Our experimental results indicate that there is...

Sanctions are widely used to promote compliance in principal-agent-relationships.While there is ample evidence confirming the predicted positive incentive effect of sanctions,it has also been shown that imposing sanctions may in fact reduce complianceby crowding-out intrinsic motivation. We add...

If the future market wage is uncertain, engaging in long{term employment is risky, withthe risk depending on how regulated the labor market is. In our experiment long{term employment can result either from oering long{term contracts or from repeatedlyand mutually opting for rematching....

We construct a simple three person trust game with one trustor and two trustees. The trustorhas the possibility to either trust both trustees or none, while the trustees make their decisionseither sequentially or simultaneously, depending on the treatment. When trustees play...

The existing literature acknowledges that a mismatch between the experimenter'sand the subjects' models of an experimental task can adversely aect the interpretation ofdata from laboratory experiments. We discuss why the two common experimental designs(between-subjects and within-subjects) used...

Previous research indicates that risky and uncertain marginal returnsfrom the public good significantly lower contributions. This paper presentsexperimental results illustrating that the effects of risk and uncertainty dependon the employed parameterization. Specifically, if the value of the...

We study interaction effects between intra-firm conflicts and interfirm competitionon a duopolistic market with seller firms employing one or more agents and imple-menting tournament incentives. We show that inter-firm competition leads to higherincentive intensity, higher efforts and output...