Research

I am very interested in the importance of interdependent (other-regarding) preferences for economic behavior. In general, I am using field and laboratory experiments to explore corresponding research questions from the areas of personnel and labor economics, public economics and law. My current research mainly focuses on the following two fields:

Incentives and Motivation (not only) at the Workplace

So far I have studied the importance of non-monetary gift exchange as well as the consequences of negative reciprocity in natural employment relationships that feature contractual incompleteness. I also looked at the interaction between team performance, remuneration schemes and production functions; in particular with respect to the equity principle and the phenomenon of incentives reversal. My latest article studies the influence of implicit costs on work performance under monotone and non-monotone incentive schemes.

Cooperation, Sanctions and Norms

My research here covers factors that shape the cooperation in groups, e.g., working teams. So far I have studied how decentralized social sanctions can help to mitigate social dilemmas; for example in the presence of counter-punishment opportunities, latent payback mechanisms or probation.