We conducted a laboratory study with a public goods game in which contributions are not submitted all at once but incrementally as coordinated in real time by a clock. Individuals press a button as soon as the clock equals their willingness to contribute. This public goods institution exploits...

This paper studies the e_ect of introducing costly partner selection for the voluntary contribution to a public good. Subjects participate in six sequences of five rounds of a two-person public good game in partner design. At the end of each sequence subjects can select a new partner out of six...

Similar to Levati and Neugebauer (2001), a clock is used by which participants can vary their individual contributions for voluntarily providing a public good. As time goes by, participants either in(de)crease their contribution gradually or keep it constant. Groups of two poorly and two richly...

The indirect evolutionary approach integrates forward-looking evaluation of opportunities and adaptation in the light of the past. Subjective motivation determines behavior, but long-run evolutionary success of motivational types depends on objective factors only, what can justify intrinsic...

We adopt an evolutionary approach to investigate whether and when conditional cooperation can explain the voluntary contribution phenomenon often observed in public goods experiments and real life. Formally, conditional cooperation is captured by a regret parameter describing how much an...

We study the effects of leadership on the private provision of a public good when group members are heterogeneously endowed. Leadership is implemented as a sequential public goods game where one group member contributes first and all the others follow. Our results show that the presence of a...

We examine the effects of leading by example in voluntary contribution experiments. Leadership is implemented by letting one group member contribute to the public good before followers do. Such leadership increases contributions in comparison to the standard voluntary contribution mechanism,...

Direct transfers allow heirs to freely use what has been passed on to them. Bequeathers who do not trust their descendants to make proper use of the fortune may prefer investing it in a safe foundation, thereby limiting their descendants' autonomy. In our study we compare experimentally these...