In this paper we replicate and extend the experiment of Fehr and Gaechter (2000) that analyzes the effect of an opportunity to punish others on the level contributions in the Voluntary Contributions Mechanism. The punishment is costly for both the players distributing and those receiving the...

In physical models it is well understood that the aggregate behaviour of a system is not in one to one correspondence with the behaviour of the average individual element of that system. Yet, in many economic models the behaviour of aggregates is thought of as corresponding to that of an...

Cette expérience sur les mécanismes de contribution volontaire à un bien public utilise une fonction de paiement qui définit l'optimum de Pareto à l'intérieur de l'espace stratégique des contributions. Deux optima sont comparés. L'un est défini à 30% de la contribution individuelle,...

This paper brings experimental evidence on investors' behavior subject to an "illiquidity" constraint, where the success of a risky project depends on the participation of a minimum number of investors. The experiment is set up as a frameless coordination game that replicates the investment...

The authors test the hypothesis that individual effort on the job depends both on one's own income and on the individual's position in the relevant income distribution. Combining experimental evidence from a gift-exchange game with multi-country ISSP survey data, they analyze the extent to which...

This paper shows that if a very small, exogenously given probability of terminating the exchange is introduced in an elementary investment game, more reciprocators will choose the defection strategy. Everything happens as if they "hide behind probabilities" in order to break the trust...

Competition among producers within an integrated electricity system is impeded by any limited transmission capacity there may be at its borders. Two alternative market mechanisms have recently been designed to organize the allocation of scarce transmission capacity at cross-border level: (i) the...

This paper assesses the contribution of laboratory experiments to the economics of design applied to the electricity industry. The analysis is dedicated to wholesale markets, and reviews the results accumulated to date concerning both the general architecture of power markets and the very...