Almost all international environmental agreements include a minimum participation rule. Under such a rule an agreement becomes legally binding if and only if a certain threshold in terms of membership or contribution is reached. We analyze a cartel game with open membership and heterogeneous...

We analyze the characteristics of new businesses in the German ICT industry, distinguishing them based on their choice between two IPR regimes: open source software (OSS) or closed source software (CSS). The share of new firms with an OSS-based business model has increased considerably over the...

Spinoff firms are exceptional performers across industries. The causes for the emergence of spinoff firms are widely investigated in the literature. However, the role of teams for spinoffs has received little scholarly attention. On one hand, talented individuals may find it necessary to team up...

We introduce a procedurally fair rule to study a situation where people disagree about the value of three alternatives in the way captured by the voting paradox. The rule allows people to select a final collective ranking by submitting a bid vector with six components (the six possible rankings...

Power indices are mappings that quantify the influence of the members of a voting body on collective decisions a priori. Their nonlinearity and discontinuity makes it difficult to compute inverse images, i.e., to determine a voting system which induces a power distribution as close as possible...

Institutional settings and the resulting incentive structures are crucial for economic development. The type of entrepreneurial activity and the entrepreneurial effort are especially dependent on underlying incentive structures. We argue that institutions with better incentive structures for...

Costly signaling of commitment to a group has been proposed as an explanation for participation in religion and ritual. But if the signal's cost is too small, freeriders will send the signal and behave selflshly later. Effective signaling may then be prohibitively costly. If the average level of...

Should people be allowed to leave joint projects freely or should they be deterred from breaking off? This depends on why people stop collaborating and whether they have good reasons to do so. We explore the factors that lead to the breakdown of partnerships by studying a public good game with...

The provision of public goods regularly embodies interrelated spheres of influence on multiple scales. This article examines the nature of human behavior in a multilevel social dilemma game with positive provision externalities to local and global scales. We report experimental results showing...

Previous research indicates that risky and uncertain marginal returns from the public good significantly lower contributions. This paper presents experimental results illustrating that the effects of risk and uncertainty depend on the employed parameterization. Speci?cally, if the value of the...