The paper presents the results of a lab-in-the-field experiment in three South African townships located in the suburbs of Cape Town. The experimental design consists of a set of decisions on how the members of a naturally occurring group allocate an endowment to a private or to a public...

The pervasiveness of the entrepreneurial phenomenon attracts the attention on the determinants of the decision of becoming entrepreneur. As the entrepreneurial decision can be additionally conceived as firm entry, as a real business investment in the creation of a new business and as a career...

Creativity is a complex and multi-dimensional phenomenon that has hardly been considered byeconomists, despite a great deal of economic importance. This paper presents a series ofexperiments where subjects face creativity tasks where, in one case, ex-ante goals and constraintsare imposed on...

We experimentally investigate cooperation within a finitely repeated public goods game framework where peer punishment is possible but, unlike previous work, in each round access to sanctioning power is exclusively awarded to the group’s top contributor. We compare this mechanism with a...

Is culture an important variable to explain whether groups can successfully provide public goods? A wealth of empirical evidence on both industrialized and developing countries shows that cooperation levels decrease in the presence of ethnic divisions. Although several laboratory works deal with...

<title>Abstract</title> The pervasiveness of the entrepreneurial phenomenon draws scholars’ attention to what determines the decision to become an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurial decisions imply judgemental decisions. Different approaches in economics conceive such judgemental decisions as firm entry, or real...

In dealing with peer punishment as a cooperation enforcement device, laboratory studies have typically concentrated on discretionary sanctioning, allowing players to castigate each other arbitrarily. By contrast, in real life punishments are often meted out only insofar as punishers are entitled...

Studies have found that people are overconfident in estimation involving difficult tasks but underconfident in easy tasks. Conversely, they are overconfident in placing themselves in easy tasks but underconfident in hard tasks. These findings can be explained by a regression hypothesis that...

A stylized fact shows that firms rarely seek for radical breakthroughs and more frequently invest in small improvements of the existing technology. This paper proposes a model that compares firms’ value when firms can invest in strategies implying different degrees of innovativeness. The model...