| Summary: | This dissertation consists of three essays in experimental economics. The essays investigate different aspects of reputation in fairness games in a controlled laboratory environment. It has been established in the literature of economics, sociology, and psychology that social norms together with other-regarding preferences often govern subjects' decisions in addition to strategic considerations. The dissertation examines the incentives connected with the existence of social norms that could cause deviations from standard economic model predictions. I use experiments so that I can tightly control the environment and provide rigorous tests of existing theories, stylized facts, and anecdotal evidence on the importance of reputation in economic interactions. The first essay presents findings that reputation triggers indirectly reciprocal behavior of subjects. However, reputation might only be signaling what is considered as socially appropriate behavior. This hypothesis and the results of the first essay led me to develop a set of experiments in the second essay to contrast pure reputation effects with the social influence of reputation. The third part of the dissertation, co-authored with Ninghua Du, examines reputation and efficiency wages in a labor market setting by analyzing the effects of negative technological shocks on long run relationships between firms and workers.
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