We analyze a repeated principal-agent setting in which the principal cares about the agent's verifiable effort as well as an extra profit that can be generated only if the agent is talented. The agent is overconfident about his talent and updates beliefs using Bayes' rule. An exploitation...

Growing interest in using personality variables in economic research leads to the question whether personality as measured by psychology is useful to predict economic behavior. Is it reasonable to expect values on personality scales to be predictive of behavior in economic games? It is undoubted...

Which behavior-based interventions are more appropriate to induce energy saving: energy saving goals with or without incentive, energy saving products, environmentally related information, social comparison or competition? We try to answer this question in a comprehensive study. First, we...

This paper investigates in a principal–agent environment whether and how group membership influences the effectiveness of incentives and when incentives can have “hidden costs”, i.e., a detrimental effect. We show experimentally that in all interactions control mechanisms can have hidden...

Growing interest in using personality variables in economic research leads to the question whether personality as measured by psychology is useful to predict economic behavior. Is it reasonable to expect values on personality scales to be predictive of behavior in economic games? It is undoubted...

Abstract Driven by methodological concerns, theoretical considerations, and previous evidence, we systematically test the validity of common dictator-game variants with probabilistic incentives. We include four approaches and compare them to a standard dictator game: involving fewer receivers...

It is a well-known fact that people respond to incentives; however, people respond differently on how these incentives are presented. This study aims to verify whether there are significant differences among the individual, team, and mix incentive strategies through an experimental setup. The...

We study whether poverty can induce affective states that decrease productivity. In a controlled laboratory setting, we find that subjects randomly assigned to a treatment, in which they view a video featuring individuals that live in extreme poverty, exhibit lower subsequent productivity...

We analyze both theoretically and empirically how monetary incentives and information about others’ behavior affect dishonesty. We run a laboratory experiment with 560 participants, each of whom observes a number from one to six with there being a payoff associated with each number. They can...

This paper investigates in a principal-agent environment whether and how group membership influences the effectiveness of incentives and when incentives can have “hidden costs”, i.e., a detrimental effect. We show experimentally that in all interactions control mechanisms can have hidden...