The sanctioning of norm-violating behavior by an effective formal authority is an efficient solution for social dilemmas. It is in the self-interest of voters and is often favorably contrasted with letting citizens take punishment into their own hands. Allowing informal sanctions, by contrast,...

Entrusting the power to punish to a central authority is a hallmark of civilization. We study a collective action dilemma in which self-interest should produce a sub-optimal outcome absent sanctions for non-cooperation. We then test experimentally whether subjects make the theoretically optimal...

We experimentally investigate information aggregation through majority voting when some voters are biased. In such situations, majority voting can have a "?dark side"?, i.e. result in groups making choices inferior to those made by individuals acting alone. We develop a model to predict how two...

The burgeoning literature on the use of sanctions to support public goods provision has largely neglected the use of formal or centralized sanctions. We let subjects playing a linear public goods game vote on the parameters of a formal sanction scheme capable both of resolving and of...

This paper contributes to the micro-foundation of money in centralized markets with idiosyncratic uncertainty. It shows existence of stationary monetary equilibria and ensures that there is an optimum quantity of money. The rational solution of our model is compared with actual behavior in a...

We study risk taking on behalf of others,both with and without potential losses. A large-scale incentivized experiment is conducted with subjects randomly drawn from the Danish population. On average, decision makers take the same risks for other people as for themselves when losses are...

We explore the political acceptance of taxation in commodity markets. Participants in our experiment earn incomes by trading and must collectively choose one of two tax regimes to raise a given tax revenue. A "uniform tax" (UT) imposes the same tax rate on all markets and is fair in that it...

Cooperation can be induced by an authority with the power to mete out sanctions for free riders, but law enforcement is prone to error. This paper experimentally analyzes preferences for and consequences of errors in formal sanctions against free riders in a public goods game. With type I...

We investigate experimentally the effects of corrupt experts on information aggregation in committees. We find that non-experts are significantly less likely to delegate through abstention when there is a probability that experts are corrupt. Such decreased abstention, when the probability of...

Introducing a threshold in the sense of a minimal project size transforms a public goods game with an inefficient equilibrium into a coordination game with a set of Pareto-superior equilibria. Thresholds may therefore improve efficiency in the voluntary provision of public goods. In our one-shot...