Parsimony is a desirable feature of economic models but almost all human behaviors are characterized by vast individual variation that appears to defy parsimony. How much parsimony do we need to give up to capture the fundamental aspects of a population's distributional preferences and to...

The evidence suggests that relational contracting and legal rules play an important role incredit markets but on the basis of the prevailing field data it is difficult to pin down their causalimpact. Here we show experimentally that relational incentives are a powerful causaldeterminant for the...

Philosophers, psychologists, and economists have long argued that certain decision rights carry not only instrumental value but may also be valuable for their own sake. The ideas of autonomy, freedom, and liberty derive their intuitive appeal - at least partly - from an assumed positive...

This paper provides evidence that free riders are heavily punished even if punishment is costly and does not provide any material benefits for the punisher. The more free riders negatively deviate from the group standard the more they are punished. As a consequence, the existence of an...

Recent studies found evidence for nominal wage rigidity during periods of relatively high nominal GDP growth. It has been argued, however, that in an environment with low nominal GDP growth, when nominal wage cuts become customary, workers' opposition to nominal cuts would erode and, hence,...

This paper shows that reciprocity has powerful implications for many economic domains. It is an important determinant in the enforcement of contracts and social norms and enhances the possibilities of collective action greatly. Reciprocity may render the provision of explicit incentive...

Money illusion means that people behave differently when the same objective situation is represented in nominal or in real terms. To examine the behavioral impact of money illusion we studied the adjustment process of nominal prices after a fully anticipated negative nominal shock in an...

This paper deals with the efficiency and distributional consequences of a switch from the current German income and corporate tax system to one special variant of an intertemporally neutral tax, an extended ACE (allowance for corporate equity) corporation tax. This tax is favoured by the IFS...

In this paper we show that a simple model of fairness preferences explains major experimental regularities of common pool resource (CPR) experiments. The evidence indicates that in standard CPR games without communication and without sanctioning possibilities inefficient excess appropriation is...