Under anti-globalization and isolationism, China is seeking to portray itself as a new leader for globalization under the banner of the Silk Road initiative. Meanwhile, China's traditional and comparatively advantaged industry, silk, has faced dire predicaments and challenges for long time, and...

Although many researchers have investigated the value of open space in cities, few of them have compared them to the costs of providing this amenity. In this paper, we use the monocentric model of a city to derive a simple cost-benefit rule for the optimal provision of open space. The rule is...

Purpose: This paper addresses the nature, formalization, and neural bases of (affective) social ties anddiscusses the relevance of ties for health economics. A social tie is defined as an affectiveweight attached by an individual to the well-being of another individual...

This paper examines the impact of payment choice on charitablegiving with a door-to-door fund-raising field experiment. Respondentscan donate cash only, use debit only, or have both options. Cash donations have lower visibility vis-a-vis solicitors than debit card donations. When debit replaces...

Economic behavior often takes place in groups of small numbers of peopleinteracting with each other (like work teams, neighborhoods, socialnetworks, etc.). Characteristic of such interaction is the development of(affective) interpersonal relationships, or social ties. According tosociologists,...

We compare a partners condition where the same small group of subjects plays arepeated public good game to astrangers condition where subjects play this game in changing group formations.Subjects in the partners conditioncontribute from the first period on significantly more to the public good...

Lying to participants offers an experimenter the enticing prospect ofmaking "others' behaviour" a controlled variable,but is eschewed by experimental economists because it may pollute thepool of subjects. This paper proposes andimplements a new experimental design, the Conditional...

We develop a model for museum visits and estimate it on a large sample of holders of a museum card that provides free access to all museums. Our model distinguishes two stages, referring to the determination of the number of trips and destination choice and can deal with an effect of income on...

Explaining the evolution and maintenance of cooperation among unrelated individuals is one of the fundamental problems in biology and the social sciences. Recent experimental evidence suggests that altruistic punishment is an important mechanism to maintain cooperation among humans. In this...

This paper experimentally explores how the enforcement of cooperative behavior in a social dilemma is facilitated through institutional as well as emotional mechanisms. Recent studies emphasize the importance of negatively valued emotions, such as anger, which motivate individuals to punish free...