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This paper studies the causal impact of social ties and network structure on helping behavior in organizations. We introduce and experimentally study a game called the 'helping game,' where individuals unilaterally decide whether to incur a cost to help other team members when helping is a rivalrous good. We find that social ties have a strong positive effect on helping behavior. Individuals are more likely to help those with whom they are connected, but the likelihood of helping decreases as the social distance between individuals increases. Additionally, individuals who are randomly assigned to be more central in the network are more likely to help others.

The literature in experimental economics has linked the laboratory measurement of preferences for competition with labor market outcomes and educational choices, such as wages and career choices. If preferences for competition are an important determinant of behavior, it is crucial to develop an accurate approach to measure them. In this study, we test whether preferences for competition can be rationalized by a utility function and develop a framework for the joint treatment of preferences for competition and risk. Our design improves on previous work in that it generates a rich data set of individual-level choices, accounts structurally for the relation between risk and competition preferences, and controls carefully for overconfidence. This allows us to test whether choices to enter tournaments are consistent with GARP and to estimate with a high degree of certainty the extent to which these choices are explained by a preference for competition and not by other confounding factors present in the environment. Our findings provide strong evidence for a preference for competition at the individual level that largely satisfies GARP, and that is conceptualized by two terms in the utility function of income obtained in a competitive environment. The first term assumes that preferences for competition affect utility directly through payoffs and the second term allows preferences for competition to influence utility through risk preferences. We discuss the economic implications of both interpretations of preferences for competition and discuss their relation with risk preferences.

In this paper, we study the effects of business culture on market efficiency. We exogenously vary the type of business culture between business-is-business cultures, which consist on impersonal relationships where financial matters are paramount, and business-is-family cultures, which comprise of cohesive personal relationships where financial matters and personal attachments are intertwined. We use a laboratory experiment to assess the effect of business cultures in environments with different degrees of contract enforceability and competition. Our main results indicate that business-is-family cultures are more effective when contracts are unverifiable because they help market participants overcome problems of trust. On the other hand, we find that business-is-business cultures are more effective in competitive settings because they facilitate the severance of ties with unproductive partners.

We validate experimentally a new survey item to measure the preference for competition. The item, which measures participants' agreement with the statement "Competition brings the best out of me", predicts individuals' willingness to compete in the laboratory after controlling for their ability, beliefs, and risk attitude (Niederle and Vesterlund, 2007). We further validate the explanatory power of our survey item outside of the laboratory, by comparing responses across two samples with predicted differences in their preference for competition: professional athletes and non-athletes. As predicted, we find that athletes score higher on the item than non-athletes.