Social media have been credited with the potential of reinvigorating trust by offering new opportunities for social and political participation. This view has been recently challenged by the rising phenomenon of online incivility, which has made the environment of social networking sites hostile to many users. We conduct a novel experiment in a Facebook setting to study how the effect of social media on trust varies depending on the civility or incivility of online interaction. We find that participants exposed to civil Facebook interaction are significantly more trusting. In contrast, when the use of Facebook is accompanied by the experience of online incivility, no significant changes occur in users' behavior. These results are robust to alternative configurations of the treatments.

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How to hire voluntary helpers? We shed new light on this question by reporting a field experiment in which we invited 2859 students to help at the 'ESA Europe 2012' conference. Invitation emails varied non-monetary and monetary incentives to convince subjects to offer help. Students could apply to help at the conference and, if so, also specify the working time they wanted to provide. Just asking subjects to volunteer or offering them a certificate turned out to be significantly more motivating than mentioning that the regular conference fee would be waived for helpers. By means of an online-survey experiment, we find that intrinsic motivation to help is likely to have been crowded out by mentioning the waived fee. Increasing monetary incentives by varying hourly wages of 1, 5, and 10 Euros shows positive effects on the number of applications and on the working time Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (

In mainstream business and economics, prizes such as the Presidential Medal of Freedom are understood as special types of incentives, with the peculiar features of being awarded in public, and of having largely symbolic value. Informed by both historical considerations and philosophical instances, our study defines fundamental theoretical differences between incentives and prizes. The conceptual factors highlighted by our analytical framework are then tested through a laboratory experiment. The experimental exercise aims to analyze how prizes and incentives impact actual individuals' behavior differently. Our results show that both incentives (monetary and contingent) and prizes (non-monetary and discretional rewards) boost motivation to perform if awarded publicly, but only prizes crowd-in motivation promoting virtuous attitude.

A consistent empirical literature shows that in many organizations supervisors systemati- cally overrate their employees’ performance. Such leniency bias is at odds with the standard principal-agent model and has been explained with causes that range from social interac- tions to fairness concerns and to collusive behavior between the supervisor and the agent. We show that the principal-agent model, extended to consider loss-aversion and reference- dependent preferences, predicts that the leniency bias is comparatively less detrimental to effort provision than the severity bias. We test this prediction with a laboratory experi- ment where we demonstrate that failing to reward deserving agents is significantly more detrimental than rewarding undeserving agents. This offers a novel explanation as to why supervisors tend to be lenient in their appraisals

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E S Responding to (Un)Reasonable RequestsIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.IZA Discussion Paper No. 10189 September 2016 ABSTRACTResponding to (Un)Reasonable Requests *We consider the notions of static and dynamic reasonableness of requests in a trust game experiment. We vary systematically the experimental norm of what is expected from trustees to return to trustors, both in terms of level of each request and in terms of sequence of the requests. Static reasonableness matters in a self-biased way, in the sense that low requests justify returning less but high requests tend to be ignored. Dynamic reasonableness also matters, in the sense that, if requests keep increasing, trustees return less than if requests of different size are presented in random or decreasing order. Requests never systematically increase trustworthiness, but may decrease it.JEL Classification: C91, D01, D03, D63