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The leniency rule revisited
(2021)
The experimental literature on antitrust enforcement provides robust evidence that communication plays an important role for the formation and stability of cartels. We extend these studies through a design that distinguishes between innocuous communication and communication about a cartel, sanctioning only the latter. To this aim, we introduce a participant in the role of the competition authority, who is properly incentivized to judge the communication content and price setting behavior of the firms. Using this novel design, we revisit the question whether a leniency rule successfully destabilizes cartels. In contrast to existing experimental studies, we find that a leniency rule does not affect cartelization. We discuss potential explanations for this contrasting result.
This paper sheds new light on the role of communication for cartel formation. Using machine learning to evaluate free-form chat communication among firms in a laboratory experiment, we identify typical communication patterns for both explicit cartel formation and indirect attempts to collude tacitly. We document that firms are less likely to communicate explicitly about price fixing and more likely to use indirect messages when sanctioning institutions are present. This effect of sanctions on communication reinforces the direct cartel-deterring effect of sanctions as collusion is more difficult to reach and sustain without an explicit agreement. Indirect messages have no, or even a negative, effect on prices.
Stochastic uncertainty can cause coordination problems that may hinder mutually beneficial cooperation. We propose a mechanism of ex-post voluntary transfers designed to circumvent these coordination problems and ask whether it can increase efficiency. To test this transfer mechanism, we implement a controlled laboratory experiment based on a repeated Ultimatum Game with a stochastic endowment. Contrary to our hypothesis, we find that allowing voluntary transfers does not lead to an efficiency increase. We suggest and analyze two major reasons for this failure: first, stochastic uncertainty forces proposers intending to cooperate to accept high strategic uncertainty, which many proposers avoid; second, many responders behave only incompletely conditionally cooperatively, which hinders cooperation in future periods.
Getting a yes
(2020)
This paper studies how the request for a favor has to be devised in order to maximize its chance of success. We present results from a mini-dictator game, in which the recipient can send a free-form text message to the dictator before the latter decides. We find that putting effort into the message, writing in a humorous way and mentioning reasons why the money is needed pays off. Additionally, we find differences in the behavior of male and female dictators. Only men react positively to efficiency arguments, while only women react to messages that emphasize the dictators power and responsibility.
This paper studies how individuals discount the utility they derive from their provision of goods over spatial distance. In a controlled laboratory experiment in Germany, we elicit preferences for the provision of the same good at different locations. To isolate spatial preferences from any other direct value of the goods being close to the individual, we focus on goods with “existence value.” We find that individuals put special weight on the provision of these goods in their immediate vicinity. This “vicinity bias” represents a spatial analogy to the “present bias” in the time dimension.
This study examines whether incentives affect public employees' intention to share knowledge. Tested incentives satisfy needs for either achievement or appreciation. Both treatments were tested on implicit as well as explicit knowledge sharing. A 2 x 3 factorial survey experiment was designed to observe within-person and between-person effects. Data were collected from public employees in the core administration and healthcare sector (n = 623) in 2018. The analysis indicates that both treatments positively affect knowledge-sharing intention if it is explicit knowledge that ought to be shared. However, no effects of either treatment can be found in either type of knowledge sharing. No negative effect of the tested incentives on knowledge sharing was observed. Hence, incentives might not harm knowledge sharing but also do not pay off in organizational practice. In contrast to these motivation-enhancing human resource practices, ability and opportunity-enhancing practices should be tested to foster knowledge sharing.
Faced with the triad of time-cost-quality, the realization of knowledge-intensive tasks at economic conditions is not trivial. Since the number of knowledge-intensive processes is increasing more and more nowadays, the efficient design of knowledge transfers at business processes as well as the target-oriented improvement of them is essential, so that process outcomes satisfy high quality criteria and economic requirements. This particularly challenges knowledge management, aiming for the assignment of ideal manifestations of influence factors on knowledge transfers to a certain task. Faced with first attempts of knowledge transfer-based process improvements [1], this paper continues research about the quantitative examination of knowledge transfers and presents a ready-to-go experiment design that is able to examine quality of knowledge transfers empirically and is suitable to examine knowledge transfers on a quantitative level. Its use is proven by the example of four influence factors, which namely are stickiness, complexity, competence and time pressure.
In the time of digitalization the demand for organizational change is rising and demands ways to cope with fundamental changes on the organizational as well as individual level. As a basis, learning and forgetting mechanisms need to be understood in order to guide a change process efficiently and successfully. Our research aims to get a better understanding of individual differences and mechanisms in the change context by performing an experiment where individuals learn and later re-learn a complex production process using a simulation setting. The individual’s performance, as well as retentivity and prior knowledge is assessed. Our results show that higher retentivity goes along with better learning and forgetting performances. Prior knowledge did not reveal such relation to the learning and forgetting performances. The influence of age and gender is discussed in detail.
Hallo Zukunft!
(2022)
Gedruckte Elektronik ist nicht nur ein aufstrebendes Forschungsfeld, sie wird in naher Zukunft auch eine wesentliche Rolle in unserem Alltag spielen. Gedruckte, elektronische Bauteile können sehr dünn und flexibel sein und somit vielfältig eingesetzt werden. Für die Implementation in der (Hoch-)Schule haben die Autoren eine flexible, lichtemittierende Folie entwickelt, die mit einfachen Materialien und Methoden manuell gedruckt werden kann.
Cooperation is — despite not being predicted by game theory — a widely documented aspect of human behaviour in Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) situations. This article presents a comparison between subjects restricted to playing pure strategies and subjects allowed to play mixed strategies in a one-shot symmetric PD laboratory experiment. Subjects interact with 10 other subjects and take their decisions all at once. Because subjects in the mixed-strategy treatment group are allowed to condition their level of cooperation more precisely on their beliefs about their counterparts’ level of cooperation, we predicted the cooperation rate in the mixed-strategy treatment group to be higher than in the pure-strategy control group. The results of our experiment reject our prediction: even after controlling for beliefs about the other subjects’ level of cooperation, we find that cooperation in the mixed-strategy group is lower than in the pure-strategy group. We also find, however, that subjects in the mixedstrategy group condition their cooperative behaviour more closely on their beliefs than in the pure-strategy group. In the mixed-strategy group, most subjects choose intermediate levels of cooperation.