Essays on experimental economics

Résumé

This thesis is divided into three chapters that refer to three different topics, all of them analyzed through laboratory experiments. Although the topics may seem completely different, they have in common that they refer to social subjects. Subjects are motivated by material incentives and other non-material motives, and these two motivations are very much interconnected. In the experiments presented in this thesis I study topics where the non-material incentives may play an important role: if people prefer to interact in an environment with a system of strong punishment or in one with soft punishment, if women are less or equally corrupt than men, and if workers are affected by the earnings received by their managers. Those are topics I found interesting since they help us to understand the interaction among members of a society. Although to have a more complete treatment of the topics it would be important to include the analysis of .field data, experiments give a quick and controlled approximation to them.