The recent literature suggests that people have social preferences with a self-serving bias. Our data analysis reveals that the stylized fact of declining cooperation in repeated public goods experiments results from this bias and adaptation.

We characterize the outcomes of games when players may make binding offers of strategy contingent side payments before the game is played. This does not always lead to efficient outcomes, despite complete information and costless contracting. The characterizations are illustrated in a series of...

We propose a two dimensional infinite horizon model of public consumption in which investments are decided by a winner-take-all election. Investments in the two public goods create a linkage across periods and parties have different specialities. We show that the incumbent party vote share...

A profit-maximizing auctioneer can provide a public good to a group of agents. Each group member has a private value for the good being provided to the group. We investigate an auction mechanism where the auctioneer provides the good to the group, only if the sum of their bids exceeds a reserve...

In a model where cooperation is beneficial, but subject to cheating, and is supported by trigger strategy punishments in a repeated game, we explore the relationship between the nature of cooperation (size and composition of coalitions) and underlying inequality in the distribution of private...

This paper generalizes previous existence results on unidimensional electoral competition, by extending the traditional two-party electoral game to the case where parties have mixed motivations, in the sense that they are interested in winning the election, but also in the policy implemented...

We study whether "coercive" public provision or voluntary private provision of public goods can survive when individuals who "vote with their feet" can choose between communities that differ in the way that public goods are provided. We obtain the following findings: (i) an equilibrium always...

This paper proves an equilibrium selection result for a class of games with strategic substitutes. Specifically, for a general class of binary action, N-player games, we prove that each such game has a unique equilibrium strategy profile. Using a global game approach first introduced by Carlsson...

This paper considers bidding automata programmed by experienced subjects in sequential first price sealed bid auction experiments. These automata play against each other in computer tournaments. The risk neutral subgame perfect Nash equilibrium strategy of the independent private value model...

It is well-known in evolutionary game theory that population clustering in Prisoner Dilemma games allows some cooperative strategies to invade populations of stable defecting strategies. We adapt this idea of population clustering to a two-person trust game. Players are typed based on their...