Empirical work on Akerlof’s theory of gift exchange in labor markets has concentrated on the fair wage-effort hypothesis. In fact, however, the theory also contains a social component that stipulates that homogenous agents that are employed for the same wage level will exert more effort,...

Decision makers often take risky decisions on the behalf of others rather than for themselves. Competing theoretical models predict both, higher as well as lower levels of risk aversion when taking risk for others, and the experimental evidence is mixed. In our within-subject design, money...

Empirical work on Akerlof's theory of gift exchange in labor markets has concentrated on the fair wage-effort hypothesis. In fact, however, the theory also contains a social component that stipulates that homogenous agents that are employed for the same wage level will exert more effort,...

We develop a simple experimental setting to evaluate the role of the Taylor principle, which holds that the nominal interest rate has to respond more than one-for-one to fluctuations in the inflation rate. In our setting, the average infl ation rate fluctuates around the inflation target if the...

Previous experimental investigations have shown that expectations are not perfectly rational due to bias. Traditional adaptive models, however, in many cases do not perfectly describe the formation of expectations either. This paper makes two contributions to the experimental literature on the...

While most papers_new on team decision-making find teams to behave more selfish, less trusting and less altruistic than individuals, Cason and Mui (1997) report that teams are more altruistic than individuals in a dictator game. Using a within-subjects design we re-examine group polarization by...

We develop a simple experimental setting to evaluate the role of the Taylor principle, which holds that the nominal interest rate has to respond more than one-for-one to fluctuations in the inflation rate to exert a stabilizing effect. In our setting, the average inflation rate fluctuates around...

While standard theory assumes rational, optimizing agents under full information, the latter is rarely found in reality. Information has to be acquired and processed—both involving costs. In rational-inattentiveness models agents update their information set only when the benefit outweighs the...

In this paper we report the results of a laboratory experiment, in which we observed the behavior of agents in a simple macroeconomic setting. The structure of the economy was only partially known to the players which is a realistic feature of our experiment. We investigate whether subjects...