We study the stability of voluntary cooperation in response to varying group growth rates. Using a laboratory public … cooperation. We then study the effect of exogenously varying growth rates on cooperation. Slow growth yields higher cooperation …-reinforcing beliefs persisting under slower growth. Allowing incumbent group members to select growth rates also sustains high cooperation …

This paper provides a new way to identify conditional cooperation in a real-time version of the standard voluntary … further contribution, and use a permutation test on contribution cycles to assign a measure of conditional cooperation to each … group play. The validity of the measures is tested in an experiment. We find that roughly 20% of the plays exhibit dynamics …