Die vorliegende Dissertation widmet sich mit Hilfe kontrollierter Laborexperimente der übergeordneten Frage, wie menschliche Kooperation in Situationen ermöglicht werden kann, in denen die materiellen Anreize egoistisches, nicht gruppendienliches Verhalten begünstigen. Diese Frage wird in der...

In this dissertation the influence of social networking sites (= SNSs) on the daily lives of their users was analyzed. In the theoretical part, the concept of online social capital was developed as a theoretical framework through which to understand and analyze the use of these websites. On the...

This dissertation is a compilation of papers on entrepreneurship which investigate related research questions. The unifying element of the different parts is the focus on two important concepts in entrepreneurship research, namely human capital and social capital. Briefly, the four main chapters...

We study the dynamics of the private provision of a public good that requires both capacity buildup and ongoing operating costs. We show that setting a time limit for the collection of contributions dedicated to capacity buildup minimizes the utility loss at the Nash equilibrium. We test the...

This paper experimentally examines how religious festivals and the degree of religiosity affect cooperation and altruistic punishment by using public goods experiments. We conducted the experiments in Turkey at different points in time; one on the most religious day during Ramadan (the Night of...

We test if cooperation is promoted by rank-order competition between groups in which all groups can be ranked first, i.e. when everyone can be a winner. This type of rank-order competition has the advantage that it can eliminate the negative externality a group's performance imposes on other...

Because costly punishment is not credible, subgame perfection suggests that punishment will not deter free riding, regardless of the size or structure of groups. However, experiments show that people will punish free riders, even at considerable cost. To examine the implications of agents who...