In a wide variety of settings, spiteful preferences would constitute an obstacle to cooperation, trade, and thus economic development. This paper shows that spiteful preferences - the desire to reduce another's material payoff for the mere purpose of increasing one's relative payoff - are...

This paper investigates time inconsistencies in food consumption based on a field experiment at a college canteen where participants repeatedly select and consume lunch menus. The design features a convex non-monetary budget in a natural environment and satisfies the consume-on-receipt...

This paper investigates time inconsistencies in food consumption based on a field experiment at a college canteen where participants repeatedly select and consume lunch menus. The design features a convex non-monetary budget in a natural environment and satisfies the consume-on-receipt...

We report on several experiments on the optimal allocation of ownership rights. The experiments confirm the property rights approach by showing that the ownership structure affects relationship-specific investments and that subjects attain the most efficient ownership allocation despite starting...

We provide evidence that long-term relationships between trading parties emerge endogenously in the absence of third party enforcement of contracts and are associated with a fundamental change in the nature of market interactions. Without third party enforcement, the vast majority of trades are...

The canonical model of life-cycle labor supply predicts a positive response of labor supplied to transitory wage changes. We tested this prediction by conducting a randomized field experiment with bicycle messengers. In contrast to previous studies we can observe in which way working hours as...

Economists long considered money illusion to be largely irrelevant. Here we show, however, that money illusion has powerful effects on equilibrium selection. If we represent payoffs in nominal terms, choices converge to the Pareto inefficient equilibrium; however, if we lift the veil of money by...

Typically, laboratory experiments suffer from homogeneous subject pools and self-selection biases. The usefulness of survey data is limited by measurement error and by the questionability of their behavioral relevance. Here we present a method integrating interactive experiments and...

Money illusion means that people behave differently when the same objective situation is represented in nominal terms rather than in real terms. This paper shows that seemingly innocuous differences in payoff representation cause pronounced differences in nominal price inertia indicating the...