We compare voluntary contributions to the financing of a public good in a symmetric setting to those in asymmetric settings, in which four players have different, randomly allocated endowments. We observe that a weak asymmetry in the endowment distribution leads to the same contribution level as...

According to economists, severe legal sanctions deter violations of the law. According to legal scholars, people may obey law backed by mild sanctions because of norm-activation. We experimentally investigate the effects of mild and severe legal sanctions in the provision of public goods. The...

We report experimental evidence on the voluntary provision of public goods under threshold uncertainty. By explicitly comparing two prominent technologies, summation and weakest link, we show that uncertainty is particularly detrimental to threshold attainment under weakest link, where low...