This paper reports an experiment which compares behaviour in two punishment regimes: (i) a standard public goods game with punishment in which subjects are given the opportunity to punish other group members (democratic punishment regime) and (ii) a public goods game environment where all group...

Reciprocal cooperation can be studied in the Centipede game, in which two players alternate in choosing between a cooperative GO move and a non-cooperative STOP move. GO sustains the interaction and increases the player pair's total payoff while incurring a small personal cost; STOP terminates...

If actors want to reach a particular goal, they are often better off forming collaborative relations and investing together rather than investing separately. We study the coordination and cooperation problems that might hinder successful collaboration in a dynamic network setting. We develop an...

The question to what extent social environment affects how individuals govern their groups, has received no special academic attention, yet. Within the framework of a ten-period public goods experi&ment we analyse how social identity affects subjects ́choice of punishment: They may either...

This article analyzes how the anticipation of peer-punishment affects cooperativeness in the provision of public goods under social identity. For this purpose we conduct one-shot public good games with induced social identity and implement in-group, out-group and random matching protocols. Our...

We study the coevolution of cooperation, preferences and cooperative signals in an environment where individuals engage in a signaling-extended prisoner's dilemma. We identify a new type of evolutionary equilibrium - a transitional equilibrium - which is constituted and stabilized by the dynamic...

Who benefits from the ignorance of others? We address this question from the point of view of a policy maker who can induce some ignorance into a system of agents competing for resources. Evolutionary game theory shows that when unconditional cooperators or ignorant agents compete with defectors...

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: (1) opportunity to commit to their partner; (2) the cost of dissolving committed...

The article suggests a new explanation for cooperation in large, unstructured societies that avoids the restrictions required in most previous attempts. Our explanation deals with the role of internalized norms. Even internalized norms, i.e. norms that alter the perceived utility from acting in...

We propose a simple model for why we have more trust in people who cooperate without calculating the associated costs. Intuitively, by not looking at the payoffs, people indicate that they will not be swayed by high temptations to defect, which makes them more attractive as interaction partners....