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The use of screening contracts is a common approach to solve supply chain coordination problems under asymmetric information. One main assumption in this context is that managers without specific incentives would rather use their private information strategically than reveal it truthfully. This harms supply chain performance. This study investigates the impact of information sharing in a principal‐agent setting that is typical for many supply chain transactions. We conduct a laboratory experiment to test whether information sharing has an influence on supply chain coordination. We find that information sharing within the supply chain has two positive effects. First, information sharing reduces the inefficiencies resulting from information deficits if there is a certain amount of trust in the supply chain. Second, communication can limit out‐of‐equilibrium behavior with a small impact on the firm's own payoff, but a large impact on the supply chain partner. Furthermore, we find that both effects are amplified when communication takes place in an environment that allows the less informed supply chain party to punish or to reward the better informed party. Although our extended mechanisms substantially enhance the poor performance of the theoretically optimal coordination contract menu, we find no mechanism that implements supply chain performance superior to the theoretically predicted second‐best level.

We present a field experiment to assess the effect of own and peer wage variations on actual work effort of employees with hourly wages. Work effort neither reacts to an increase of the own wage, nor to a positive or negative peer comparison. This result seems at odds with numerous laboratory experiments that show a clear own wage sensitivity on effort. In an additional real-effort laboratory experiment we show that explicit cost and surplus information that enables to exactly calculate employer's surplus from the work contract is a crucial prerequisite for a positive wage-effort relation. This demonstrates that employee's reciprocity requires a clear assessment of the surplus at stake. Keywordsefficiency wage, reciprocity, fairness, field experiment, real effort JEL Codes C91, C92, J41 AcknowledgementsWe thank Heidi Schrader and Anke Schmalenbach for research assistance. We thank Ernst Fehr, Reinhard Selten, and three anonymous referees for helpful comments. We are grateful for comments and suggestions on our work by participants

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Many renewable resources are in intergenerational common pools, exploited by one generation after another. In our experiment, the stock available to each generation depends on the extent of exploitation by previous generations and on resource's growth rate, which is either "slow" or "fast." Subjects show altruistic restraint in exploitation, but not enough to achieve the social optimum. The presence of an intergenerational link induces subjects-both in "slow" and in "fast"-to expect less resource exploitation from each other than subjects expect in a single generation control. On average, expectations are too optimistic, especially in "slow," where intended free-riding behavior is predominant.

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