The Motivation Crowding Effect suggests that external intervention via monetary incentives or punishments may undermine, and under different identifiable conditions strengthen, intrinsic motivation. As of today, the theoretical possibility of motivation crowding has been the main subject of discussion among economists. This study demonstrates that the effect is also of empirical relevance. There exist a large number of studies, offering empirical evidence in support of the existence of crowding-out and crowding-in. The study is based on circumstantial evidence, laboratory studies by both psychologists and economists, as well as field research by econometric studies. The pieces of evidence presented refer to a wide variety of areas of the economy and society and have been collected for many different countries and periods of time. Crowding effects thus are an empirically relevant phenomenon, which can, in specific cases, even dominate the traditional relative price effect.

In recent years, there has been a steadily increasing interest on the part of economists in happiness research. We argue that reported subjective well-being is a satisfactory empirical approximation to individual utility and that happiness research is able to contribute important insights for economics. We report how the economic variables income, unemployment and inflation affect happiness as well as how institutional factors, in particular the type of democracy and the extent of government decentralization, systematically influence how satisfied individuals are with their life. We discuss some of the consequences for economic policy and for economic theory.

Employees are motivated intrinsically as well as extrinsically. Intrinsic motivation is crucial when tacit knowledge in and between teams must be transferred. Organizational forms enable different kinds of motivation and have different capacities to generate and transfer tacit knowledge. Since knowledge generation and transfer are essential for a firm's sustainable competitive advantage, we ask specifically what kinds of motivation are needed to generate and transfer tacit knowledge, as opposed to explicit knowledge.

Institutional factors in the form of direct democracy (via initiatives and referenda) and federal structure (local autonomy) systematically and sizeably raise self-reported individual well-being in a cross-regional econometric analysis. This positive effect can be attributed to political outcomes closer to voters' preferences, as well as to the procedural utility of political participation possibilities. Moreover, the results of previous microeconometric well-being functions for other countries are generally supported. Unemployment has a strongly depressing effect on happiness. A higher income level raises happiness, however, only to a small extent.To discover the sources of people's well-being is a major concern in the social sciences. Many inquiries have been undertaken to identify the determinants of individual happiness. This paper analyses data on reported subjective wellbeing in order to directly assess the role of democratic and federal institutions on people's satisfaction with life. Thus, a new set of determinants is considered, which expands previous research results showing the effects on happiness of individual income and unemployment, as well as of aggregate unemployment, in¯ation and income growth (see Oswald, (1997) for a survey). 1 We argue that institutional conditions with regard to the extent and form of democracy have systematic and sizeable effects on individual well-being, in addition to demographic and economic factors. Using recent interview data from 6,000 residents of Switzerland, we show that individuals are ceteris paribus happier, the better developed the institutions of direct democracy are in their area of residence. This also applies to a second institution, the degree of government decentralisation (federalism). Finally, we are able to support some of the earlier results for other countries and periods with new data also based on a survey with a large sample size. In particular, we ®nd that the unemployed are much less happy than employed persons, and that a higher household income level only raises happiness to a small extent.

People behave pro-socially in a Eide variety of situations that standard economic theory is unable to eHplain. Social comparison is one eHplanation for such pro-social behaviorI people contribute if others contribute or cooperate as Eell. This paper tests social comparison in a field eHperiment at the University of Zurich. Each semester every single student has to decide Ehether he or she Eants to contribute to tEo Social *unds. We provided 2500 randomly selected students Eith information about the average behavior of the student population. Some received the information that a !"#! percentage of the student population contributed, Ehile others received the information that a relatively $%& percentage contributed. The results shoE that people behave pro-socially, conditional on others. The more others cooperate, the more one is inclined to do so as Eell. The type of person is important. We are able to fiH the OtypesP by looking at revealed past behavior. Some persons seem to care more about the pro-social behavior of others, Ehile other OtypesP are not affected by the average behavior of the reference group.