In an experimental study we examine a variant of the ‘minimum effort game’, acoordination game with Pareto ranked equilibria, and risk considerations pointing to theleast efficient equilibrium. We focus on the question whether simple cues such as smiles,winks and handshakes could be...

Trust games are employed to investigate the effect of heterogeneity in income and5 race on cooperation in South Africa. The amount of socio-economic informationavailable to the subjects about their counterparts is varied. No significantbehavioural differences are observed when no such...

We study the effect of fair institutions on growth. In our model, individuals are endowed with unequal entitlements to theeconomy’s output. They can free-ride or cooperate. Cooperation is individually costly, but increases aggregate output and growth.Experimentally, we observe significantly...

Vom Internet gehen wesentliche Veränderungen auf die Markenpflege aus. Die klassischeMarkenpflege, die durch geplante Aktionen in kontrollierter Umwelt gekennzeichnetist, stellt sich für das Web 2.0-Zeitalter als zu kurz gegriffen heraus. Der Markenmanagermuss unter diesen neuen Bedingungen...

The economic literature on online auctions is rapidly growing because of theenormous amount of freely available field data, moreover the emergence ofnumerous innovative auction design features on auction platforms such aseBay have created excellent research opportunities. In this article, we...

We analyze the effect of income taxation with limited loss deduction on investment decisions.An experiment with five treatments was conducted, one without taxation as a reference andfour with taxation and limited loss compensation. The participants’ task was to repeatedlychoose one out of two...

Two of the top economics journals have institutional ties to a specific university, the Quarterly Journal of Economics (QJE) to Harvard University and the Journal of Political Economy (JPE) to the University of Chicago. Researchers from Harvard, but also nearby Massachusetts Institute of...

Internet services are often free of charge but ask for customers' personal data in exchange for usage. We experimentally study whether the provision of information-based public goods is susceptible to restraint when contributions not only make contributors better off but also enable a...

A new line of theoretical and empirical literature emphasizes the pivotal role of fair institutions for growth. We present a model, a laboratory experiment, and a simple cross-country regression supporting this view. We model an economy with an unequal distribution of property rights, in which...

We report an experiment that uses the strategy method (Selten 1967) to elicit subjects' general strategy for playing any 2-person 3x3-game with integer payoffs between 0 and 99. Each two subjects' strategies play 500000 games in each of the 5 tournaments. For games with pure strategy equilibria...