We provide a test of the role of social preferences and beliefs in voluntary cooperation and its decline. We elicit individuals' cooperation preferences in one experiment and use them as well as subjects' elicited beliefs to explain contributions to a public good played repeatedly. We find...

Does the cultural background influence the success with which genetically unrelated individuals cooperate in social dilemma situations? In this paper we provide an answer by analyzing the data of Herrmann et al. (Science 2008, pp. 1362-1367), who study cooperation and punishment in sixteen...

In this paper we demonstrate how the impure public good model can be converted into a pure public good model with satiation of private consumption, which can be handled more easily, by using a variation of the aggregative game approach as devised by Cornes and Hartley (2007). We point out the...

This chapter presents some insights from basic behavioural research on the role of human pro-social motivation to maintain social order. I argue that social order can be conceptualized as a public good game. Past attempts to explain social order typically relied on the assumption of selfish and...

In this paper we examine the potential of democratic constitutions for the provision of divisible public goods in a large economy. Our main insights are as follows: When aggregate shocks are absent, the combination of the following rules yields first-best allocations: a supermajority rule, equal...

Using the aggregative game approach as developed by Cornes and Hartley (2003, 2007) this paper analyzes the conditions under which matching mechanisms in a public good economy lead to interior matching equilibria in which all agents make strictly positive flat contributions to the public good....

Politicians may pander to public opinion and may renounce undertaking beneficial long-term projects. To alleviate this problem, we introduce a triple mechanism involving political information markets, reelection threshold contracts, and democratic elections. An information market is used to...

Matching mechanisms are regarded as an important instrument to bring about Pareto optimal allocations in a public good economy and to cure the underprovision problem associated with private provision of public goods. The desired Pareto optimal interior matching equilibrium, however, emerges only...

Recent international climate negotiations suggest that complete agreements are unlikely to materialize. Instead, partial cooperation between like-minded countries appears a more likely outcome. In this paper we analyze the effects of such partial cooperation between like-minded countries. In...