We use experimental methods to investigate whether pledges of commitment can improve cooperation in endogenously formed partnerships facing a social dilemma. Treatments vary in terms of the individual's (a) opportunity to commit to their partner, (b) the cost of dissolving committed...

Social norms are a ubiquitous feature of social life and pervade almost every aspect of human social interaction. However, despite their importance we still have relatively little empirical knowledge about the forces that drive the formation, the maintenance and the decay of social norms. In...

We experimentally study settings where an individual may have an incentive to adopt negative beliefs about another's intentions in order to justify egoistic behavior. Our first study uses a game in which a player can take money from an opponent in order to prevent the opponent from subsequently...

We study whether one reason behind female underrepresentation in leadership is that female leaders are less effective at coordinating action by followers. Two experiments using coordination games investigate whether female leaders are less successful than males in persuading followers to...

We study subgame-perfect implementation (SPI) mechanisms that have been proposed as a solution to incomplete contracting problems. We show that these mechanisms - which are based on off-equilibrium arbitration clauses that impose large fines for lying and the inappropriate use of arbitration -...

The launch of a public project requires support from "enough" members of a group. Members (players) are differently important for the project and have different cost/benefit relations. There are players who profit and players who suffer from the launch of the project. Examples are the Kyoto...

In Binary Threshold Public Good (BTPG) games players contribute or not to the production of a public good which is produced if and only if there are "enough" contributors. There is a plethora of equilibria in BTPG games. We experimentally test general theoretical attributes of equilibria and...

Theories about unique equilibrium selection are often rejected in experimental investigations. We drop the idea of selecting a single prominent equilibrium but suggest the coexistence of different beliefs about "appropriate" equilibrium or non-equilibrium play. Our main selection criterion is...

In Binary Threshold Public Good (BTPG) games n players contribute or not to the production of a public good which is produced if and only if there are at least k contributors. The BTPG games with the highest (k=n) and the lowest (k=1) threshold are the Stag Hunt game and the Volunteer's Dilemma....

This paper considers all-pay contests in which the relationship between bids and allocation reflects a small amount of noise. Prior work had focused on one particular equilibrium. However, there may be other equilibria. To address this issue, we introduce a new and intuitive measure for the...