We experimentally investigate whether the procedural history of a sanctioning institution affects cooperation in a social dilemma. Subjects inherit the institutional setting from a previous generation of subjects who either decided on the implementation of the institution democratically by...

We analyse two team settings in which one member in a team has stronger incentives to contribute than the others. If contributions constitute a sacrifice for the strong player, the other team members are more inclined to cooperate than if contributions are strictly dominant for the strong...

Laboratory experiments by Fudenberg and Pathak (2010), and Vyrastekova, Funaki and Takeuch (2008) show that punishment is able to sustain cooperation in groups even when it is observed only in the end of the interaction sequence. Our results demonstrate that the real power of unobserved...

Broken Windows: the metaphor has changed New York and Los Angeles. Yet it is far from undisputed whether the broken windows policy was causal for reducing crime. In a series of lab experiments we show that first impressions are indeed causal for cooperativeness in three different institutional...

We analyse two team settings in which one member in a team has stronger incentives to contribute than the others. If contributions constitute a sacrifice for the strong player, the other team members are more inclined to cooperate than if contributions are strictly dominant for the strong player.

Laboratory experiments by Fudenberg and Pathak (2010), and Vyrastekova, Funaki and Takeuch (2008) show that punishment is able to sustain cooperation in groups even when it is observed only in the end of the interaction sequence. Our results demonstrate that the real power of unobserved...

The realization of market transactions often depends on decisions in groups in which members are anonymous and cannot communicate, but have interrelated outcomes. In a comprehensive study, we investigated the interaction of group effects, strategic effects and endowment effects in different...

In the dictator game, the recipient's opportunity to send a message to the dictator increases giving. This paperreports two experimentswhich study how the timing of messages affects dictators' decisions (experiment 1) and which value recipients attach to communication opportunities (experiment...

In the dictator game, the recipient's opportunity to send a message to the dictator increases giving. This paperreports two experimentswhich study how the timing of messages affects dictators' decisions (experiment 1) and which value recipients attach to communication opportunities (experiment...