We test the rational economic model of marginal deterrence of law enforcement - i.e., the need for graduating the penalty to the severity of the crime. We combine individual-level data on sentence length for a representative sample of US inmates with proxies for maximum punishment and monitoring...

We investigate power abuse of a single punisher in a public-goods-game subject to variations in punishment power and contribution transparency. We find a high amount of abuse across all conditions. More power led to more abuse over time, while transparency could only curb abuse in the high power...

This paper aims to relate the issue of the Motherhood Wage Penalty to the institutional framework "Varieties of Capitalism." Using data from the Luxembourg Income Study, we perform cross-national analyses on the discrepancy in wages between mothers with young children and females without...

In the present paper we propose a new method, the Penalized Adaptive Method (PAM), for a data driven detection of structure changes in sparse linear models. The method is able to allocate the longest homogeneous intervals over the data sample and simultaneously choose the most proper variables...

This paper studies drivers' responses to a "notched" penalty scheme in which speeding penalties are stepwise and discontinuously increasing in speed. We present survey evidence suggesting that drivers in Germany are well aware of the notched penalty structure. Based on a simple analytical...

Drawing on the real-options theory we analyse bidding behaviour in a sealed-bid-first-score procurement auction where suppliers, facing variable production costs, must simultaneously report the contract price and the cost level at which they intend to perform the project. We show that this award...

Online labor markets provide new opportunities for behavioral research, but conducting economic experiments online raises important methodological challenges. This particularly holds for interactive designs. In this paper, we provide a methodological discussion of the similarities and...

Online labor markets provide new opportunities for behavioral research, but conducting economic experiments online raises important methodological challenges. This particularly holds for interactive designs. In this paper, we provide a methodological discussion of the similarities and...

This paper presents an analysis of general time preferences in the canonical Rubinstein (1982) model of bargaining, allowing for arbitrarily history-dependent strategies. I derive a simple sufficient structure for optimal punishments and thereby fully characterize (i) the set of equilibrium...

Duration analysis has been widely used in the applied economic research since the late 1970s. The framework allows to examine the duration of time intervals and the rate of transition across a set of states over time. Many economic behaviors follow a similar pattern, such as transition from the...

Firms regularly use incentives to motivate their employees to be more productive. However, often little attention is paid to the language used in employment contracts to describe these incentives. It may be more effective to present incentives as entitlements that can be lost by failing to reach...

This paper develops a positive model of informal contracting in which rewards and punishments are not determined by an ex ante optimal plan but instead express the ex post moral sentiments of the arbitrating party. We consider a subjective performance evaluation problem in which a principal can...

Challenges in global politics like climate change, maritime piracy and fighting highly contagious diseases concern global public goods. The related policy decisions are mostly made by teams. In contrast, economic models of global public goods typically assume a single rational decision-maker. We...

This paper examines the earnings premiums associated with different types of employment in 73 countries. Workers are divided into four categories: Non-professional own-account workers, employers and own-account professionals, informal wage employees, and formal wage employees. Approximately half...

This paper studies experimentally how the endogeneity of sanctioning institutions affects the severity of punishment in social dilemmas. We allow individuals to vote on the introduction of third-party-administered sanctions, and compare situations in which the adoption of this institution is...

We provide an example for an errors in variables problem which might be often neglected but which is quite common in lab experimental practice: In one task, attitude towards risk is measured, in another task participants behave in a way that can possibly be explained by their risk attitude. How...

Theoretical models have had difficulties to account, at the same time, for the most important stylized facts observed in experiments of the Voluntary Contribution Mechanism. A recent approach tackling that gap is Arifovic and Ledyard (2012), which implements social preferences in tandem with an...

Contracts are used to coordinate disparate but interdependent members of the supply chain. Conflicting objectives of these members and lack of coordination among the members lead to inefficiencies in matching supply with demand. This study reviews different types of contracts and proposes a...

We investigate the role of framing, inequity in initial endowments and history in shaping behavior in a corrupt transaction by extending the one-shot bribery game introduced by Cameron et al. (2009) to a repeated game setting. We find that the use of loaded language significantly reduces the...

We provide an example for an errors in variables problem which might be often neglected but which is quite common in lab experimental practice: In one task, attitude towards risk is measured, in another task participants behave in a way that can possibly be explained by their risk attitude. How...

This paper reports the results of an experimental investigation which allows a deeper insight into the nature of social preferences amongst organized criminals and how these differ from "ordinary" criminals on the one hand and from the non‐criminal population in the same geographical area on...

Over 20 percent of prison and jail inmates in the United States are currently awaiting trial, but little is known about the impact of pre-trial detention on defendants. This paper uses the detention tendencies of quasi-randomly assigned bail judges to estimate the causal effects of pre-trial...