Innovations and Economic Activities
The RPA-BE contributes to a conducive research environment for doing behavioural economic research. The unifying factor in the research of the RPA-BE is the extensive use of the experimental method. With this method, researchers of the RPA-BE have made contributions to a wide variety of topics in economics.
The scientific highlights of the RPA-BE include:
- New behavioural insights on how competition can be encouraged in thin uncompetitive markets (like premiums for highest losing bidders in auctions, and like combining separate markets in Right-to-Choose auctions) and the study of the possibility to use auctions for charity purposes;
- A central focus on the role of indirect reciprocity in the evolution of human cooperation;
- New evidence on biological gender differences in competition;
- A new behavioural theory of heterogeneous expectations for macro and financial markets has been developed and fitted to individual micro as well as aggregate macro experimental data;
- Convincing natural-experimental evidence for social effects in consumption between households that win a lottery prize and their non-winning neighbors;
- Empirical insights on the effects of extrinsic financial rewards on intrinsic motivation using a randomised field experiment in which first-year university students could earn rewards for passing all first-year requirements within one year.