Experimental studies of social dilemmas have shown that while the existence of a sanctioning institution improves cooperation within groups, it also has a detrimental impact on group earnings in the short-run. Could the introduction of pre-play threats to punish have enough of a beneficial...

We develop a model that accounts for the decay of the average contribution observed in experiments on voluntary contributions to a public good. The novel idea is that people's moral motivation is "weak"". Their judgment about the right contribution depends on observed contributions by group...

When a deficit occurs in the funding of collective goods, it is usually covered by raising the amount of taxes or by rationing the supply of the goods. This article compares the efficiency of these institutions. We report the results of a 2x2 experiment based on a game in the first stage of...

In a public-good experiment with heterogeneous endowments, we investigate if and how the contribution level as well as the previously observed fair-share rule of equal contributions relative to one's endowment (Hofmeyr et al., 2007; Keser et al., 2014) may be influenced by minimum-contribution...

Agents face an ambiguous risk of biodiversity survival as well as ambiguous expected losses from its extinction. As a collectivity, agents are faced with the option of privately funding the protection of biodiversity for biomedical research. We propose two evolutionary models of threshold public...

In this paper, we investigate individuals' investment in status in an environment where no monetary return can possibly be derived from reaching a better relative position. We use a real-effort experiment in which we permit individuals to learn and potentially improve their relative position in...

This paper compares guilt alleviation and competition for social status in the private provision of a public good. When agents are intrinsically impulsed, that is, they mostly provide the public good in order to alleviate their guilt, they tend to free-ride. In contrast, when agents are...

This paper sets out a simple dynamic probabilistic voting model in which a government allocates a fixed budget across electoral districts that differ in their loyalty to the ruling party. The model predicts that the geographic pattern of spending depends on the way the government balances...

Subjects submitted strategies for playing a public good game. The strategies interacted with each other in a computer simulation. They could be revised and resubmitted for a second and a third simulation round. The strategies' average contribution to the public good increased from one simulation...

We develop a theoretical model in which each individual is, in some ultimate sense, motivated by purely egoistic satisfaction derived from the goods accruing to him, but there is an implicit social contract such that each performs duties for the others in a way that enhances the satisfaction of...