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Information unraveling is an elegant theoretical argument suggesting that private information may be fully and voluntarily surrendered. The experimental literature has, however, failed to provide evidence of complete unraveling and has suggested senders' limited depth of reasoning as one behavioral explanation. In our novel design, decisionmaking is essentially sequential, which removes the requirements on subjects' reasoning and should enable subjects to play the standard Nash equilibrium with full revelation. However, our design also facilitates coordination on equilibria with partial unraveling which exist with other-regarding preferences. Our data confirm that the new design is successful in that it avoids miscoordination entirely. Roughly half of the groups fully unravel whereas other groups exhibit monotonic outcomes with partial unraveling. Altogether, we find more information unraveling with the new design, but there is clear evidence that other-regarding preferences do play a role in impeding unraveling.

We study strategic interaction in an experimental social-preferences vacuum chamber. We mute social preferences by letting participants knowingly interact with computers. Our new design allows for indirect strategic interaction: there are several waves in which computer players inherit the behavior of human players from the previous wave. We apply our method to investigate trembling-hand perfection in a normal-form version of the ultimatum game. We find that behavior remains far off from a trembling-hand perfect equilibrium under selfish preferences even towards the end of our experiment. The likely reasons for our findings are strategic uncertainty and incomplete learning.

In this paper, we discuss learning behavior and the heterogeneity of subjects' ability to perform in real-effort tasks. Afterwards, we present a novel variant of Erkal et al.'s (2011) encryption real-effort task which aims to minimize learning behavior in repeated settings. In the task, participants encrypt words into numbers. In our variant, we apply a double-randomization mechanism to minimize learning and heterogeneity. Existing experiments with repeated real-effort tasks find a performance increase of 12-14% between the first and second half. By contrast, our task mitigates learning behavior down to 2% between the first and second half. The data show that subjects show a small heterogeneity in performance.

This paper studies motivational crowding-out effects after financial incentives are lowered. In a real-effort setting, workers receive a piece rate before financial incentives are substituted by a one-time payment. Under the fixed payment, effort is significantly lower only when preceded by piece-rate incentives. The decrease is driven by a fraction of men who reduce their effort by 12%, whereas women constantly perform well. We find that this motivational crowding-out effect disappears when men do not have prior experience of a piece rate. In a series of control treatments, we discard all alternative explanations besides from motivational crowding out.

Im Jahr 2010 wurde eine Reform des Finanzierungsmodells für den öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunk beschlossen. Mit Wirkung zum 01.01.2013 trat der Rundfunkbeitragsstaatsvertrag (RBStV) in Kraft, der die bisherige geräteabhängige Rundfunkgebühr durch einen geräteunabhängigen Beitrag ersetzt. Nach der Begründung zum Fünfzehnten Staatsvertrag zur Änderung rundfunkrechtlicher Staatsverträge sollte der RBStV unter anderem die Anforderung der Aufkommensneutralität erfüllen und Vollzugsdefizite des alten Finanzierungsmodells unter dem Rundfunkgebührenstaatsvertrag beseitigen. Vor diesem Hintergrund ist die Beantwortung der folgenden Fragen Gegenstand der vorliegenden Untersuchung: 1. Wie hoch wäre das jährliche erzielbare Rundfunkbeitragsaufkommen unter dem RBStV, wenn alle Beitragsschuldner konsequent in Anspruch genommen würden? 2. War die Höhe dieses erzielbaren Beitragsaufkommens bei Unterzeichnung des RBStV/ Fünfzehnten Rundfunkänderungsstaatsvertrages im Dezember 2010 erkennbar? Bei der Beantwortung der Frage 1 kommt die vorliegende Studie zu folgendem Ergebnis: Insgesamt müssten die Rundfunkanstalten bei konsequenter (d. h. vollzugsdefizitloser Umsetzung) des RBStV nach konservativster Berechnung ein jährliches Beitragsaufkommen in Höhe von mindestens 8,37 Milliarden Euro realisieren. Die Frage 2, ob das hier berechnete erzielbare Aufkommen bei Unterzeichnung des RBStV im Dezember 2010 hätte prognostiziert werden können, ist uneingeschränkt zu bejahen. Als Datengrundlage für die Berechnungen in diesem Gutachten dienen u.a. das Statistische Jahrbuch 2009 sowie Statistiken des Kraftfahrt-Bundesamtes. Beide Quellen waren bereits im Dezember 2010 verfügbar, d. h. zu dem Zeitpunkt, als der Rundfunkbeitragsstaatsvertrag unterzeichnet wurde. Eine Steigerung des Aufkommens für den Fall der Erreichung des mit der Reform des Finanzierungsmodells u.a. verfolgten Ziels der Beseitigung von Vollzugsdefiziten war also bereits 2010 absehbar.

We elicit the willingness to sell personal data (contact information, Facebook details, preferences) in laboratory experiments, using a BDM and take-it-or-leave-it offers. Our experiments are novel in that (i) the experiments are incentivized, (ii) the focus on privacy issues is salient, and (iii) the use of the data - marketing purposes - is transparent and unambiguous. We find that only a minority of about 10% to 20% of the participants are unwilling to sell personal data, a share which is roughly constant across both the type of personal data and elicitation method. Subjects willing to sell request about € 15 for their contact details and € 19 for Facebook details.

We study the voluntary revelation of private, personal information in a labor-market experiment with a lemons structure where workers can reveal their productivity at a cost. While rational revelation improves a worker's payoff, it imposes a negative externality on others and may trigger further unraveling. Our data suggest that subjects reveal their productivity less frequently than predicted in equilibrium. A loaded frame emphasizing personal information about workers' health leads to even less revelation. We show that three canonical behavioral models all predict too little rather than too much revelation: level-k reasoning, quantal-response equilibrium, and to a lesser extent inequality aversion.

We study the voluntary revelation of private, personal information in a labor-market experiment with a lemons structure where workers can reveal their productivity at a cost. While rational revelation improves a worker's payout, it imposes a negative externality on others and may trigger further unraveling. Our data suggest that subjects reveal their productivity less frequently than predicted in equilibrium. A loaded frame emphasizing personal information about workers' health leads to even less revelation. We show that three canonical behavioral models all predict too little rather than too much revelation: level-k reasoning, quantal-response equilibrium, and to a lesser extent inequality aversion. (author's abstract)

We analyze competition between workers in a gift-exchange experiment where two workers are hired by the same employer. In the competition treatment the two employees simultaneously choose their effort whereas in the baseline treatment competition cannot occur since there is only one employee per employer. We find that in the competition treatment employers implicitly set tournament incentives by rewarding employees who choose higher effort levels than their co-workers. Here, employees' effort levels increase significantly faster, which can be explained by imitation learning. Furthermore we find that employers decrease their wage payments per unit of effort exerted over time when employing two workers.