We compare the performance of liability rules for managing environmental disasters when third parties are harmed and cannot always be compensated. A firm can invest in safety to reduce the likelihood of accidents. The firm's investment is unobservable to authorities. Externality and asymmetric...

If agents are exposed to continual competitive pressure, how does a short-term variation of the severity of the competition affect agents' performance? In a real-effort laboratory experiment, we study a one-time increase in incentives in a sequence of equally incentivized contests. Our results...

We study how subjects deal with fatigue in a sequence of tournaments that are linked through fatigue spillovers. Our contribution is threefold. First, we develop a model that allows us to predict the consequences of varying the severity of competition as well as the ease of recovery over time....

We investigate experimentally whether individuals or groups are cheated more, and how lying depends on the group size and the monetary loss inflicted by the lie. We employ an observed cheating game, where an individual’s misreport of a privately observed number can monetarily benefit her while...

In experimental economics there exists a lively debate about the independence of observations. Although opinions on the issue differ widely, all concerns regard the independence of subjects' behavior within one session or experiment. This paper attempts to shed some light on the independence of...

In a recently published article, Bruni and Stanca (2008) suggest that television viewing has a negative impact on life satisfaction. In this note we argue that the empirical approach they use (an approach that omits the main effect of TV viewing in life satisfaction) is problematic. We estimate...