Frey Bruno S.

Am Beispiel der Schweizer Justizinitiative zeigen wir auf, dass eine qualifizierte Losauswahlkeineswegs irrational ist, sondern zu ei ner Rationalität auf einer übergeordneten, institutionellen Ebene führen kann. Sie erhöht die Wahrsche...

Die starke Reduktion der Gemeinden im Kanton Glarus, die 2006 an der Landsgemeinde beschlossen wurde, hat nur geringfügige finanzielle Auswirkungengebracht. Hingegen ist die Stimmbeteiligung – ein wichtiger Indikator für die Beziehung d...

The institution of a single CEO (Chief Executive Officer) has significant weaknesses.The CEO's interests diverge from those of the owners and their representants as well as other top managers. Assigning so much power to a single person is r...

Nowadays, academic journals of high standing rarely accepta conceptual idea in a paper not instantly accompanied by econometric estimates. The idea would almost certainly get rejected. Empirical validation based on past statistical data has...

This paper presents a proposal to deal with cultural overtourismcausing substantial negative effects. They burden the local population, tourists, and the natural environment by overcrowding, vandalism, and pollution. While at present touris...

We contribute to the happiness literature by analyzing the causal relationshipbetween sports and happiness. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio- Economic Panel (GSOEP), we find a positive correlation between sports participa- tion...

We propose a radically new approach to deal with major negative effects resulting fromovertourism. The major attractions of heavily visited historical sites are to be identically replicated in a new location emphasizing a vivid historical e...

By examining discrepancies between officially reported GDP growth figures andthe actual economic growth implied by satellite-based night time light (NTL) density, we investigate whether democracies manipulate officially reported GDP figures...

Empirically orientated happiness research provides valuable and new insights to both business and political economics. Managers can benefit from the knowledge gained regarding the determinantsand even more from the consequences of subjectiv...

There is a fundamental difference between the natural and the social sciences due toreactivity. This difference remains even in the age of Artificially Intelligent Learning Machines and Big Data. Many academic economists take it as a matter...

The digital revolution has led to a quantification of ever more areas of human life and society. At thesame time, there is an explosion of the number of awards , which by their very nature are based on non- quantified performance. Will quan...

We propose an immigration policy based the model of cooperatives. Incoming migrants haveto acquire a participation certificate. In exchange, the immigrants may enter the country of choice without danger. The revenue goes to the country of t...

In this contribution, we first discuss how the analysis of self-reported measures ofsubjective well-being can contribute to a better understanding of the extent to which public choices serve individuals’ preferences. Our research insights...

The external influence of scholarly activity has to date been measured primarily in terms ofpublications and citations, metrics that also dominate the promotion and grant processes. Yet the array of scholarly activities visible to the outsi...

This study investigates the determinants of economists’ life satisfaction. The analysis isbased on a survey of professional, mostly academic economists from European countries and beyond. We find that certain features of economists’ pro...

Forecasters’ estimates influence peoples’ expectations, their decisions and thus also actual market outcomes. Such reactivity to forecasts induces externalities whichharm the ex-post assessment of the forecasters’ accuracy and in turn...

This paper discusses and proposes random selection as a component in decision-making insociety. Random procedures have played a significant role in history, especially in classical Greece and the medieval city-states of Italy. We examine th...

Awards appear in various forms, ranging from the title "Employee of theMonth" to prizes, decorations, and other honors. This contribution develops a theory designed to analyze the widely-observed phenomenon of award giving. We use signaling...

A unique recent data set covering around 3,000 private art collections and collectors isused to identify their location and composition. The largest number of private collections is located in Europe, followed by North America and Asia. The...

External prominence (measured by the number of pages indexed on search engines or TED talk invitations) canbe capitalized on the speakers' market while research performance (measured by publication and citation indicators) cannot. There is ...

The external influence of scholarly activity has to date been measured primarily interms of publications and citations, metrics that also dominate the promotion and grant processes. Yet the array of scholarly activities visible to the outsi...

Under certain conditions, output related performance measurement and pay-for-performance producenegative outcomes. We argue that in public service, these negative effects are stronger than in the private sector. We combine Behavioural Econo...

This paper analyzes whether hosting the most prestigious European cultural event, theEuropean Capital of Culture, has an impact on regional economic development or the life satisfaction of the local population. Concerning the economic impac...

Despite the social importance of awards, they have been largelydisregarded by academic research in economics. This paper investigates whether a specific, yet important, award in economics, the John Bates Clark Medal, raises recipients? subs...

A statistical analysis of the UNESCO World Heritage List is presented. The WorldHeritage Convention intends to protect global heritage of outstanding value to mankind, but there has been great concern about the missing representativity of t...

Research rankings based on publications and citations today dominategovernance of academia. Yet they have unintended side effects on individual scholars and academic institutions and can be counterproductive. They induce a substitution of t...

Gordon Tullock has been one of the most important founders and contributors to PublicChoice. Two innovations are typical "Tullock Challenges". The first relates to method: the measurement of subjective well-being, or happiness. The second r...

Management research has long focused on for-profitorganizations that produce privately owned resources based on central authority and within well-defined boundaries. In recent times, a new kind of enterprise has emerged that we call Communi...

A statistical analysis of the UNESCO World Heritage List is presented. The WorldHeritage Convention intends to protect global heritage of outstanding value to mankind, but there has been great concern about the missing representativity of t...

The official intention of the UNESCO World Heritage List is to protect the global heritage.However, the existing List is highly imbalanced according to countries and continents. Historical reasons, such as historical GDP, population, and nu...

Research on happiness has produced valuable insights into the sources of subjectivewell-being that are of importance to economics. A major finding from this literature is that people exhibit a "baseline" level of happiness that shows persis...

Awards are widespread in all countries and are prevalent both in the public sphere and in theprivate sector. This paper argues, and empirically supports, that awards serve public functions and economists should take them seriously. Using a ...

Strong forces lead to a withering of academia as it exists today. The major causalforces are the rankings mania, increased division of labor in research, intense publication pressure, academic fraud, dilution of the concept of "university",...

This paper suggests that institutional factors which reward social net-works at the expenses of productivity can play an important role in ex- plaining brain drain. The e€ects of social networks on brain drain are analyzed in a decision t...

The UNESCO World Heritage List contains the 900 most treasured Sites of humanity?sculture and landscapes. The World Heritage List is beneficial where heritage sites are undetected, disregarded by national decision-makers, not commercially e...

Museums have many different goals beyond efficiency such as social equity,financial revenue, attracting donors and gaining international, regional or local prestige. Various pricing schemes are being discussed with the aim of reaching these...

Academic rankings today are the backbone of research governance, which seem to fit theaims of "new public management" on the one side and the idea of the "republic of science" on the other side. Nevertheless rankings recently came under scr...

Awards - widespread in the corporate sector and elsewhere - are motivators that derivetheir value from non-pecuniary concerns such as status and self-image. Quasi-experimental panel data from the call center of a large international bank al...

Academic economists today are caught in a "Publication ImpossibilityTheorem System" or PITS. In order to further their careers, they are required to publish in A-journals, but for the vast majority this is impossible because there are few s...

An empirical overview of the UNESCO World Heritage List according to variouscharacteristics is presented. The officially stated intention of the World Heritage List is to protect global heritage. Our focus is on the imbalance of the existin...

Peer reviews and rankings today are the backbone of research governance, but recently came under scrutiny. They take explicitly or implicitly agency theory as a theoretical basis. The emerging psychological economics opens a new perspective...

This paper argues that the ?Economics of Crime? concentrates too much on punishment as a policy to fight crime, which is unwise for several reasons. There are important instances in which punishment simply cannot reduce crime. Several feasi...

Culture has attributes of a global public good that needs to be preserved for mankind as a whole. World Culture Certificates are proposed to efficiently preserve World Heritage. The community of nations has to agree on the Global Heritage L...

In economics there is presently an almost revolutionary development. The direct measurement of subjective welfare challenges traditional economics, inspires it, and opens new avenues for scientific research. The approaches and possibilities...

Behavioral economics documents the importance of status and self-image concerns in the workplace, but is largely silent about how to instrumentalize them to induce effort. Awards|widespread in the corporate sector and elsewhere are motivato...

Academic economists today are caught in a ?Publication Impossibility Theorem System? or PITS. To further their careers, they are required to publish in A-journals, but this is impossible for the vast majority because there are few slots ope...

The sinking of the Titanic in April 1912 took the lives of 68 percent of the people aboard. Who survived? It was women and children who had a higher probability of being saved, not men. Likewise, people traveling in first class had a better...

Scholars today are under increasing pressure to publish in A-journals, the main role of which consists in certifying that a paper meets traditional academic standards. Consequences of this pressure are multiple authorship, slicing of ideas ...

Awards play a large role in the economics profession, which is documented by the large variety and number of awards. However, little scientific attention has been devoted to them. This paper documents the prevalence of awards in the economi...

This paper analyzes awards as a means of motivation prevalent in the scientific community, but so far neglected in the economic literature on incentives, and discusses their relationship to monetary compensation. Awards are better suited th...

Non-monetary incentives in the form of awards have so far escaped the attention of economists despite their widespread use. This paper presents an experiment conducted online at IBM to assess the impact of these kinds of extrinsic incentive...

In the course of history, a large number of politicians have been assassinated. Rational choice hypotheses are developed and tested using panel data covering more than 100 countries over a period of 20 years. Several strategies, in addition...

The risk of external interventions crowding-out intrinsic motivation has long been established in economics. This paper introduces a new dimension by arguing that a crowding-out effect does become possible if individuals receive higher rela...

Publication and citation rankings have become major indicators of the scientific worth of universities and countries, and determine to a large extent the career of individual scholars. We argue that such rankings do not effectively measure ...

This paper explored the determinants of survival in a life and death situation created by an external and unpredictable shock. We are interested to see whether pro-social behaviour matters in such extreme situations. We therefore focus on t...

The experimental literature and studies using survey data have established that people care a great deal about their relative economic position and not solely, as standard economic theory assumes, about their absolute economic position. Ind...

Die Benediktinerklöster weisen im Vergleich zu anderen Institutionen eine ungewöhnlich lange Lebensdauer auf. Unsere empirische Untersuchung aller je existierenden Benediktinerabteien in Bayern, Baden-Württemberg und der Deutschschweiz z...

Awards in the form of orders, decorations, prizes, and titles are ubiquitous in monarchies and republics, private organizations, not-for-profit, and profit-oriented firms. This paper argues that awards present a unique combination of differ...

Do employees care about their relative (economic) position among co-workers in an organization? And if so, does it raise or lower their performance? Behavioral evidence on these important questions is rare. This paper takes a novel approach...

The experimental literature and studies using survey data have established that people care a great deal about their relative economic position and not solely, as standard economic theory assumes, about their absolute economic position. Ind...

People care a great deal about their relative economic position and not solely about their absolute economic position. However, behavioral evidence is rare. This paper provides evidence on how the relative income position affects profession...

Awards in the form of orders, decorations, prizes, and titles are ubiquitous in monarchies and republics, private organizations, not-for-profit, and profit-oriented firms. This paper argues that awards present a unique combination of differ...

A central aspect of historical research is to provide explanations for the causes and effects of events that occurred in the past, in particular the Second World War. History can be analyzed and explained from different perspectives. Two su...

This paper analyzes and compares different ways of assessing how people perceived impending threats of war in the past. Conventional Nordic historiography of World War II claims there were few, if any, people in the Nordic countries who per...

Deterrence has been a crucial element in fighting terrorism, both in politics and in rational choice analyses of terrorism. However, there are two strategies that are superior to deterrence. The first one is to make terrorist attacks less d...

The paper investigates the relationship between pro-social norms and its implications for improved environmental outcomes, an area which has been neglected in the environmental economics literature. We provide empirical evidence, demonstrat...

In the course of history a large number of politicians has been assassinated. A rational choice analysis is used to distinguish the expected marginal benefits of killing, and the marginal cost of attacking a politician. The comparative anal...

This paper argues that politicians are overprotected. The costs of political assassination differ systematically depending on whether a private or a public point of view is taken. A politician attributes a very high (if not infinite) cost t...

Relative income differences are likely to lead to envy within a reference group. Envy in turn influences social behavior and on individual performance. While positional concerns are apparent in daily life, empirical evidence is rare in the ...

Nordic historians have asserted for a long time that in the Nordic countries only few people, if any, perceived increased threats of war prior to the World War II outbreak. This would explain, and possibly excuse, why their governments did ...

Cross-disciplinary ?happiness research? has made big progress in the measurement of individual welfare. This development makes it tempting to pursue the old dream of maximizing aggregate happiness as a social welfare function. However, we p...

Research evaluation is praised as the symbol of modern quality management. We claim firstly, performance evaluations in research have higher costs than normally assumed, because the evaluated persons and institutions systematically change t...

?Evaluitis? - i.e. ex post assessments of organizations and persons - has become a rapidly spreading disease. In addition to the well-known costs imposed on evaluees and evaluators, additional significant costs are commonly...

Many studies have established that people care a great deal about their relative economic position and not solely, as standard economic theory assumes, about their absolute economic position. However, behavioral evidence is rare. This paper...

This chapter discusses the role of environmental morale and environmental motivation in individual behavior from the point of view of economics and psychology. It deals with the fundamental public good problem, and presents empirical (labor...

This paper analyzes the impact of rewards on tax compliance as an additional instrument to take into account. While social psychologists and neuroscientists have emphasized the importance of rewards, the tax compliance literature has strong...

The traditional economic approach to tax evasion does not appear to be particularly successful in explaining the extent of tax compliance. We argue instead that a psychological tax contract which establishes a fiscal exchange between the st...

The most influential approach of corporate governance, the view of shareholders supremacy does not take into consideration that the key task of modern corporations is to generate and transfer firm-specific knowledge. It proposes that, in or...

Why so many people pay their taxes, although fines and audit probability are low, has become a central question in the tax compliance literature. A homo economicus, with a more refined motivation structure, helps us to shed light on this pu...

In this paper, we develop the concept of a psychological tax contract that goes beyond the traditional deterrence model and explains tax morale as a complicated interaction between taxpayers and the government. Based on crowding theory, the...

Recently, the problems associated with the existing journal review process aroused discussions from seasoned management researchers, who have also made useful suggestions for improving the process. To complement these suggestions, we propos...

It has often been pointed out in the literature that a symbiotic relationship exists between terrorist groups and the media. As yet, however, no formal model has been built based on this issue and only very little empirical research has bee...

Trends in arts and culture tend to be longer-lasting and less fragile than in other fields such as clothing design. Most herding models are not able to explain such stability, instead predicting informational cascades to be fragile and fads...

Many studies have established that people care a great deal about their relative economic position and not solely, as standard economic theory assumes, about their absolute economic position. However, behavioral evidence is rare. This paper...

To overcome problems produced by globalization, some people see the solution in a World Government while others see it in an autarchic global market without any government intervention. Both solutions are rejected due to their major shortco...

Famous cultural monuments are often regarded as unique icons, making them an attractive target for terrorists. Despite huge military and police outlays, terrorist attacks on important monuments can hardly be avoided. We argue that an effect...

The basic distinction made in this volume compares ?economic value?, expressed in monetary terms, to ?cultural value?, reflecting cultural, aesthetic and artistic significance. This paper makes a different distinction which is rarely made e...

The paper studies a major human activity ? that of watching TV - where many individuals have incomplete control over, and foresight into, their own behavior. As a consequence, they watch more TV than they consider optimal for themselves and...

Awards in the form of orders, medals, decorations and titles are ubiquitous in monarchies and republics, private organizations, not-for-profit and profit-oriented firms. Nevertheless, economists have disregarded this kind of non-material ex...

Corporate scandals are reflected in excessive top management compensation and fraudulent accounts. These scandals cause an enormous amount of damage, not only to the companies affected, but also to the market economy as a whole. As a soluti...

Individuals make systematic mistakes in their decisions, because they mispredict utility from choice options. When deciding, extrinsic attributes of choice options are more salient than intrinsic attributes. Adaptation is neglected, recolle...

World governance today is characterized by international organizations lacking democratic legitimacy and control by the citizens they claim to represent. They are also criticized for being inefficient. This leads to violent protests and to ...

Alienation to politics weakens political competition and can undermine the acceptance and legitimacy of democracy as a political system. Governance and representation problems at the local level cause part of citizens? lack of power and pol...

The trends and consequences of terrorist activities are often captured by counting the number of incidents and casualties. More recently, the effects of terrorist acts on various aspects of the economy have been analyzed. These costs are su...

Why so many people pay their taxes, although fines and audit probability are low, has become a central question in the tax compliance literature. Concepts of Homo Economicus, endowed with a more refined motivation structure, help to shed li...

Corporate scandals, reflected in excessive management compensation and fraudulent accounts, cause considerable damage. Agency theory?s insistence on linking the compensation of managers and directors as closely as possible to firm performan...

Distortions in memory impose important bounds on rationality but have been largely disregarded in economics. While it is possible to learn, it is more difficult, and sometimes impossible, to unlearn. This retention effect lowers individual ...

This paper intends to provide an evaluation of where the economic research on happiness stands and in which interesting directions it might develop. First, the current state of the research on happiness in economics is briefly discussed. We...

This paper discusses a novel approach to elicit people?s preferences for public goods, namely the life satisfaction approach. Reported subjective well-being data are used to directly evaluate utility consequences of public goods. The streng...

A crucial aspect of constitutional design is the provision of rules on how a constitution is to be amended. If procedures for constitutional amendment are very restrictive, changes will take place outside the constitution. These changes are...

Over the past few years, there has been a steadily increasing interest on the part of economists in happiness research. This paper argues that reported subjective well-being is a satisfactory empirical approximation to individual utility an...

People not only care about outcomes, they also value the procedures which lead to the outcomes. Procedural utility is a potentially important source of human well-being. This paper aims at introducing the concept of procedural utility into ...

The most influential theory of corporate governance, principal agency theory, does not take into consideration that the key task of modern corporations is to generate and transfer firm-specific knowledge. It proposes that, in order to overc...