Using a laboratory experiment, we examine whether informal monetary sanctions can lead to better coordination in a repeated minimum effort coordination game. While most groups first experience inefficient coordination, the efficiency increases substantially after introducing an ex post...

I examine how financial incentives interact with intrinsic motivation and especially cognitive abilities in explaining heterogeneity in performance. Using a forecasting task with varying cognitive load, I show that the effectiveness of high-powered financial incentives as a stimulator of...

This paper extends existing evidence on the interaction between financial incentives and cognitive capital. I focus on the impact of task-specific cognitive capital, the role of which is central to the capital-labor-production framework of Camerer and Hogarth (1999) and has long been studied in...

Gneezy, List and Wu [Q. J. Econ. 121 (2006) 1283-1309] document that lotteries are often valued less than the lotteries' worst outcomes. We show how to undo this result.

We study the nature of dominance violations in three minimalist dominance-solvable guessing games, featuring two or three players choosing among two or three strategies. We examine how subjects' reported reasoning translates into their choices and beliefs about others' choices, and how reasoning...

We replicate three pricing tasks of Gneezy, List and Wu (2006) for which they document the so called uncertainty effect, namely that people value a binary lottery over non-monetary outcomes less than other people value the lottery's worse outcome. Unlike the authors who implement a verbal...

The higher our aspirations, the higher the probability that we have to adjust them downwards when forming more realistic expectations later on. This paper shows that the costs induced by high aspirations are not trivial. We first develop a theoretical framework to identify the factors that...

The higher our aspirations, the higher the probability that we have to adjust them downwards when forming more realistic expectations later on. This paper shows that the costs induced by high aspirations are not trivial. We first develop a theoretical framework to identify the factors that...

We investigate to what extent genuine social preferences can explain observed other-regarding behavior. In a social dilemma situation (a dictator game variant), people can choose whether to learn about the consequences of their choice for the receiver. We find that a majority of the people that...

In economic theory, utility depends on past, present and future outcomes. The experiment described in this paper suggests that utility also depends on people's attitudes, and that it can easily be manipulated through these attitudes. The results imply, first, that purely outcome-based models of...