Previous research on corporate social responsibility generally acknowledges that consumers develop more favourable perceptions of responsible firms. Yet few empirical works have focused on the effects of the firm's societal communication and of its characteristics on brand equity. In this paper...

In asserting that the number of firms reporting small profits is abnormally high, thus suggesting that earnings management has taken place, accounting researchers assume that the distribution of reported earnings should be smooth for unmanaged earnings. This has never in fact been demonstrated....

We devise an experiment to explore the effect of different degrees of bargaining power on the design and the selection of contracts in a hidden-information context. In our benchmark case, each principal is matched with one agent of unknown type. In our second treatment, a principal can select...

We conducted a sensitivity analysis of results in weighted voting experiments by varying the following two features of the protocol by Montero et al. (2008): (a) the way subjects' roles are reassigned in each round (random versus semi-fixed roles) and (b) the number of proposals that subjects...

This paper aims at understanding whether firms should engage in CSR communications towards consumers, or let independent third parties do so. A generalisable sample of 275 adults participated in an experiment, manipulating third-parties credible information (positive information, negative, or...

Are women disproportionately attracted to work environments where cooperation rather than competition is rewarded? This paper reports the results of a real-effort experiment in which participants choose between an individual compensation scheme and a team-based payment scheme. We find that women...

A demand for behavioral norms arises when members of a group have individual incentives to take actions that reduce the group's overall welfare (James S. Coleman, 1990). Norms require enforcement with a system of sanctions that penalize deviations from acceptable behavior (George C. Homans,...

Whereas economists have made extensive studies of the impact of levels of incentives on behavior, they have paid little attention to the effects of regularity and frequency of incentives. We contrasted three ways of rewarding participants in a real-effort experiment in which individuals had to...

We devise an experiment to explore the effect of different degrees of competition on optimal contracts in a hidden-information context. In our benchmark case, each principal is matched with one agent of unknown type. In our second treatment, a principal can select one of three agents, while in a...

Variable pay not only creates a link between pay and performance but may also help firms in attracting the more productive employees (Lazear 1986, 2000). However, due to lack of natural data, empirical analyses of the relative importance of the selection and incentive effects of pay schemes are...