This paper focuses on the relationship between individual self-control and peer pressure. To this end, we implement a laboratory experiment that proceeds in two parts. The first part involves an individual real-effort task in which subjects may commit themselves to achieve a certain level of...

We study how participation in decision processes shapes people's behavior towards impartial authorities. In an incentivized laboratory experiment, an impartial decision maker at first decides about the allocation of money between two subordinates. Treatments differ in the opportunity for one...

We study experimentally whether and to what extent impartial decision makers are influenced by stakeholders’ fairness opinions in an allocation decision. The setting allows for different focal fairness rules to be considered. We compare communication treatments, in which one of the...

How do people react to setbacks and successes? I introduce a new measure of challenge-seeking to determine the effect of winning and losing in a competition on the willingness to seek further challenges. Participants in a lab experiment compete in two-person tournaments and are then informed of...

This paper implements an experimental test of a game-theoretic model of equilibrium profiling. Attackers choose a demographic “type” from which to recruit, and defenders choose which demographic types to search. Some types are more reliable than others in the sense of having a higher...

In this paper we contribute to the discussion on whether intellectual property rights foster or hinder innovation by means of a laboratory experiment. We introduce a novel Scrabble-like creativity task that captures most essentialities of a sequential innovation process. We use this task to...

In this study, we employ a game theoretic framework to formulate and analyze tax audit schemes; we test the theoretical predictions in a laboratory experiment. We compare five audit schemes including three rule-based audits: random audit rule, cut-off audit rule, and lowest income reporter...

Most common physician payment schemes include some form of traditional capitation or fee-for-service payment. While health economics research often focuses on direct incentive effects of these payments, we demonstrate that the opportunity to sort into one’s preferred payment scheme may also...

Recent health policy reforms try to increase consumer choice. We use a laboratory experiment to analyze consumers’ tastes in typical contract attributes of health insurances and to investigate their relationship with individual risk preferences. First, subjects make consecutive insurance...

We study whether cognitive ability explains choices in a wide variety of behavioral tasks, including riskand social preferences, by collecting evidence from almost 1,200 subjects across eight experimentalprojects. Since Frederick (2005)'s Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) has been administered to...