The monetary value of informal eldercare in the family and voluntary sector has drawn much attention as it concerns a resource of welfare governments and nonprofit organizations try to activate via cash benefits. Studies addressing the issue in order to assess the economic impact of non-market activities and the willingness to accept financial rewards have largely ignored differences in the utility function of caregivers. Applying a behavioral-economic approach, we report a profound and formerly unobserved distinction between care in the household and non-household care for a family member or in a voluntary framework: whereas caregivers within the household perceive care as a burden and a positive shadow price arises, in the non-household context—and particularly in the volunteering case–care extends well-being and leads to negative shadow prices. The results show that non-market activities can only be measured in monetary terms to a limited extent and contribute to explaining the boundaries of monetary incentive policies.

This article examines selected system-level variables. Its premise is that a better understanding of how and why scholars may, or may not, choose an international orientation in their career requires taking into account factors beyond personal preferences or constraints. We suggest that characteristics of national systems shape prospects and strategies of internationalisation and look at two broadly defined variables: resource availability and career incentives. With respect to the first, we study the absolute level of national resources and their relative importance vies-a-vis those provided by the EU. With respect to the second, we consider the rules and norms governing the progress of academic careers, especially the extent to which international collaboration is significant and necessary for initially attaining a stable academic position and career advancement. We explore these questions through targeted comparison of four national cases, selected to ensure crosscutting variation across the selected variables. A comparison of two relatively low-resource cases (Bulgaria and the Czech Republic) with two relatively high-resource ones (France and Finland) is followed by a comparison with respect to career incentives. This allows to conclude that both factors should be considered as necessary conditions for internationalisation, and to suggest how this hypothesis might be further tested in subsequent research.

Research concerning executive compensation has a long history. However, most studies have been conducted on publicly traded investor-owned enterprises. Although the not-for-profit sector experienced explosive growth during the 1990s, little work has been devoted to understanding its executive compensation schemes and incentives arrangements. In the United States, recent Federal and State legislation has changed the landscape under which nonprofits must operate to avoid penalties for paying excessive compensation to its executives. Studies of compensation schemes under different organizational arrangements are limited. This paper uses the U.S. hospital industry to link the for-profit and nonprofit compensation and incentive literatures. It highlights selected for-profit executive compensation and incentive processes and suggests how some of these methods could be applied in a nonprofit setting.

European political scientists lag behind their US counterparts when it comes to publication in peer-reviewed outlets and for many established academics publication declines as they reach more advanced stages of their careers. I attribute this mainly to a lack of incentives to publish more, and through better channels. Based mainly on recent Norwegian developments, I acknowledge that efforts are being made to improve the situation, but argue that more can be done by universities, research institutes, and research councils.

Awards are widely used as incentives. This paper situates awards in the broader incentives landscape and shows how the motivational value of awards can be understood through a framework that considers three sources of value: the tangible component of an award, the social signals it emits, and its self-signaling function. We identify and discuss several major characteristics of awards through the lenses of these three dimensions: the audience, scarcity, the giver’s status, and the selection process. Based on our framework, we integrate the awards literature published across economics, psychology, management, and sociology journals to elucidate what has been learned and offer a roadmap for future experimental research on awards and incentives.

The partisan gap in economic perceptions flipped unusually dramatically after the 2024 U.S. presidential election: following the Republican victory, Democrats (Republicans) suddenly rated the economy much more negatively (positively). Was the resulting partisan difference a case of expressive responding, wherein surveys exaggerate partisan bias in measures of economic perceptions? In April 2025, I fielded a panel survey experiment that asked survey respondents to guess then-unpublished measures of economic growth, inflation, and unemployment in the current month or quarter (Prolific, N = 2,831). Randomly selected respondents were offered $2 per correct answer. Partisan bias did not shrink as a result, suggesting genuine differences in economic perceptions. Two measures of response effort (response time and looking up answers) increase, suggesting that misreporting does not fully explain the effects of pay-for-correct treatments.

I study the optimal design of monetary incentives in experiments where incentives are a treatment variable. I propose a novel framework called the Budget Minimization problem in which a researcher chooses the level of incentives that allows her to detect a predicted treatment effect while minimizing her expected budget. The Budget Minimization problem builds upon the power analysis and structural modeling. It extends the standard optimal design approach by explicitly incorporating the budget as a part of the objective function. I prove theoretically that the problem has an interior solution under fairly mild conditions. To showcase the practical applications of the Budget Minimization problem, I provide examples of its implementation in several well-known experiments. I also offer a practical guide to assist researchers in utilizing the proposed framework. The Budget Minimization problem contributes to the experimental economists’ toolkit for an optimal design, however, it also challenges some conventional design recommendations.

Efficient coordination is a major source of efficiency gains. We study in an experimental coordination game with 727 children and teenagers, aged 9 to 18 years, the strategies played in pre-adulthood. In our one-shot, experimental coordination game, we vary the incentives for reaching the more efficient equilibrium and the number of subjects within a group. Looking at strategy choices dependent on age, we do not find robust age effects in the aggregate. Yet, we see that smaller group sizes and larger incentives increase the likelihood of choosing the efficient strategy. The larger strategic uncertainty in larger groups is obviously harmful for overall efficiency. Regarding incentives, we find that increasing the profits in the efficient equilibrium seems to work better than providing a cushion in case of miscoordination. Beliefs play an important role as well, as subjects are more likely to play the efficient strategy when they expect others to do so as well. Our results are robust to controlling for individual risk-, time-, and social preferences.

A key challenge when surveying political elites is recruitment. Low response rates can lead to biased samples and underpowered designs, threatening the validity of descriptive and experimental scholarship. In a randomized control trial, we test the effects of sending postal invitations in a large survey of local elected officials. We find that German and UK local politicians are more likely to complete the survey if invited by postal mail, rather than simply by email. Recruitment mode does not impact the quality of responses but shapes the population of local officials recruited. Officials invited via postal letter were more likely to come from smaller municipalities and less likely to have a college degree. Costs per response are relatively high but can be reduced as we learn more about selection into elite surveys.