Pay What You Want (PWYW) can be an attractive marketing strategy to price discriminate between fair-minded and selfish customers, to fully penetrate a market without giving away the product for free, and to undercut competitors that use posted prices. We report on laboratory experiments that...

In Bartling, Fehr and Schmidt (2012) we show theoretically and experimentally that it is optimal to grant discretion to workers if (i) discretion increases productivity, (ii) workers can be screened by past performance, (iii) some workers reciprocate high wages with high effort and (iv)...

Several recent papers argue that contracts provide reference points that affect ex post behavior. We test this hypothesis in a canonical buyer-seller relationship with renegotiation. Our paper provides causal experimental evidence that an initial contract has a highly significant and...

We propose a theory of ex post inefficient renegotiation that is based on loss aversion. When two parties write a long-term contract that has to be renegotiated after the realization of the state of the world, they take the initial contract as a reference point to which they compare gains and...

We propose a theory of ex post inefficient renegotiation that is based on loss aversion. When two parties write a long-term contract that has to be renegotiated after the realization of the state of the world, they take the initial contract as a reference point to which they compare gains and...

The privatization process in Eastern Europe is not irreversible. Future governments may want to (partially) expropriate successful private firms in order to subsidize unsuccessful ones. We use a simple median voter model to predict the policy of future governments. It is shown that there will be...

We show experimentally that fairness concerns may have a decisive impact on the actual and optimal choice of contracts in a moral hazard context. Bonus contracts that offer a voluntary and unenforceable bonus for satisfactory performance provide powerful incentives and are superior to explicit...

The paper offers a selective survey on the incomplete contracts approach to privatization. Furthermore, a simple model of privatization to an owner-manager is developed in which different allocations of ownership rights lead to different allocations of inside information about the firm which in...

There is a general presumption that social preferences can be ignored if markets are competitive. Market experiments (Smith 1962) and recent theoretical results (Dufwenberg et al. Forthcoming) suggest that competition forces people to behave as if they were purely self-interested. We qualify...