A conjecture of Laffer, which had considerable influence on fiscal doctrine, is that tax revenues of a Leviathan state eventually decrease when the tax rate exceeds a threshold value. We conduct a real effort experiment, in which a "worker" is matched with a non-working partner, to elicit the...

This paper focuses on decision making under risk, comparing group and individual risk preferences in a lottery-choice experiment inspired by Holt and Laury (2002). The experiment presents subjects with a menu of unordered lottery choices which allows us to measure risk aversion. In the...

We study the relationship between inequality and inter-groups conflicts (riots), focussing on social inequality. Disadvantaged societal groups experience discrimination and thus have limited access to some social and labour resources like education or employment. First, we experimentally...

We develop a model that accounts for the decay of the average contribution observed in experiments on voluntary contributions to a public good. The novel idea is that people's moral motivation is "weak"". Their judgment about the right contribution depends on observed contributions by group...

We study antisocial preferences in simple money-burning tasks. A decision maker can choose whether or not to reduce another person's payoff at an own cost. We vary across tasks the initial endowment of the decider and the victim. We find that most conventional expectations are refuted: Subjects...

This paper reports the results of a laboratory experiment that aims at investigating the effect of manipulating reputation in the context of online decentralized feedback systems, such as eBay. Our experimental results indicate that the agents do not hesitate to manipulate their reputation even...

Several online marketplaces, like eBay provide their users with reputation management mechanisms (evaluations, ratings,...). This article aims at investigating the impact of these reputation mechanisms on trust building and market efficiency, through a set of experiments based on the trust game...

Microfinance is generally associated with high repayment rates. However, it is not clear whether the success of microfinance results only from the use of group lending or is also due to other mechanisms such as peer sanctioning or dynamic incentives induced by long-term relationships that are...

The World Trade Center attack has shed light on the urgent need to implement preventing measures against terrorism and to enhance cooperation in the global security system for all countries. However, international coordination cannot be taken for granted. It is often ineffective and likely to...

Many empirical studies have shed light on the efficiency of peer pressure. I propose here to model peer pressure by incorporating in the utility function self centered inequity aversion. I find that opportunity for sufficiently inequity averse players to punish their peers, is effective in...