This paper provides a new way to identify conditional cooperation in a real-time version of the standard voluntary contribution mechanism. We define contribution cycles as the number of contributors a player waits for before committing to a further contribution, and use a permutation test on...

We study experimentally voluntary contributions to public goods when none, some, or all previous decisions are observable. When agents observe previous moves, they tend to condition their cooperation on observed cooperation. This leads to two effects of increased transparency: on the one hand,...

Understanding the motivations behind people’s voluntary contributions to public goods is crucial for the broader issues of economic and social development. By using the experimental design of Fischbacher, Gächter, and Fehr (2001), we investigate the distribution of contribution types in two...

We investigate voluntary contribution to public goods in culturally heterogeneous groups with a laboratory experiment conducted among 432 Hindu and Muslim subjects in India. With our specification of ‘Leading by example’ we test for an interaction effect between leadership and religious...

We investigate the effects of information feedback in rent-seeking games with two different contest structures. In the share contest a contestant receives a share of the rent equal to her share of rent-seeking expenditures, while in the lottery contest a contestant wins the entire rent with...

Decisions about public goods in the real world are frequently made by trustees—individuals responsible for managing pools of contributed funds—rather than by the contributors themselves. We conduct a laboratory experiment to compare contributions made by trustees who play with other trustees...

This paper studies whether prosocial values are transmitted from parents to their children. We do so through an economic experiment, in which a group of Hispanic and African American families play a standard public goods game. The experimental data presents us with a surprising result. We find...

We compare the effects of and the motivations behind voluntary punishment and reward in a finitely repeated public goods game. Our experimental results show that (1) the level of cooperation is indistinguishable between the punishment and reward treatments when group membership does not change,...

This paper studies whether prosocial values are transmitted from parents to their children. We do so through an economic experiment in which children and their parents play a standard public goods game. The experimental data presents us with a surprising result. While we find significant...

The data from experiments with the Voluntary Contributions Mechanism suggest five stylized facts, including the restart effect. To date, no theory has explained all of these facts simultaneously. We merge our Individual Evolutionary Learning model with a variation of heterogeneous...