Male and female choices differ in many economic situations, e.g., on the labor market. This paper considers whether such differences are driven by different attitudes towards competition. In our experiment subjects choose between a tournament and a piece-rate pay scheme before performing a real...

When it examines the risk of coordinated effects, an antitrust authority will usually compare the situation where the merger is accepted with an attendant risk of collusion with the benchmark case in which competition is present ex-post. The main objective of this paper is to show that the...

The paper extends the standard tax evasion model by allowing for social interactions. In Manski's (1993) nomenclature, our model takes into account social conformity effects (i.e., endogenous interactions), fairness effects (i.e., exogenous interactions) and sorting effects (i.e., correlated...

When exogenously imposed, rank-order tournaments have incentive properties but their overall efficiency is reduced by a high variance in performance (Bull, Schotter, and Weigelt 1987). However, since the efficiency of performance-related pay is attributable both to its incentive effect and to...

The ratio bias––according to which individuals prefer to bet on probabilities expressed as a ratio of large numbers to normatively equivalent or superior probabilities expressed as a ratio of small numbers––has recently gained momentum, with researchers especially in health economics...

This paper experimentally investigates the impact of different pay and relative performance information policies on employee effort. We explore three information policies: No feedback about relative performance, feedback given halfway through the production period, and continuously updated...

Most studies on the role of incentives on risk attitude report data obtained from within-subject experimental investigations. This may however raise an issue of sequentiality of effects as later choices may be influenced by earlier ones. This paper reports instead between-subject results on the...

Although economics has long been considered as a non-experimental science, the development of experimental economics and behavioral economics is amazingly rapid and affects most fields of research. This paper first attempts at defining the main contributions of experiments to economics. It also...

Variable pay not only creates a link between pay and performance but may also help firms in attracting the more productive employees (Lazear 1986, 2000). However, due to lack of natural data, empirical analyses of the relative importance of the selection and incentive effects of pay schemes are...

Human Capital over the Life Cycle: A European Perspective identifies the problem of human capital creation as one of the fundamental issues in the development of knowledge-based economies.