We analyse interethnic cooperation in an infinitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma when members of one group are unable to target punishment towards individual defectors from the other group. We first show that indiscriminate punishment may sustain cooperation in this setting. Our main result,...

We introduce intention-based social preferences into a mechanism design framework with independent private values and quasilinear payoffs. For the case where the designer has no information about the intensity of social preferences, we provide conditions under which mechanisms which have been...

We modify the provision point mechanism by introducing reward money, which is distributed among the contributors in proportion to their contributions only when the provision point is not reached. In equilibrium, the provision point is always reached as competition for reward money and preference...

Centralized sanctioning institutions are of utmost importance for overcoming free-riding tendencies and enforcing outcomes that maximize group welfare in social dilemma situations. However, little is known about how such institutions come into existence. In this paper we investigate, both...

This paper proposes a simple two-stage mechanism to establish positive contributions to public goods in the absence of powerful institutions to provide the public good and to sanction free-riders. In this mechanism players commit to the public good by paying a deposit prior to the contribution...

This paper surveys recent advances in the application of random dy- namical systems theory in economics. It illustrates the usefulness of this framework for modeling and analysis of economic phenomena with stochastic components, mainly focusing on stochastic dynamic models in economic growth....

Consider a society where all agents initially play "fair" and one agent invents a "cheating" strategy such as doping in sports. Which factors determine the success of the new cheating strategy? In order to study this question we consider an evolutionary game with heterogenous agents who can...

In recent years a large number of experimental studies have documented the existence of strong reciprocity among humans. Strong reciprocity means that people willingly repay gifts and punish the violation of cooperation and fairness norms even in anonymous one-shot encounters with genetically...

There is abundant evidence that many individuals violate the rationality assumptions routinely made in economics. However, powerful evidence also indicates that violations of individual rationality do not necessarily refute the aggregate predictions of standard economic models that assume full...