In public goods environments, the threat to punish non-contributors may increase contributions. However, this threat may make players' contributions less informative about their true social preferences. This lack of information may lead to lower contributions after the threat disappears, as we...

Religion and ritual have been characterized as costly ways for conditional cooperators to signal their type, and thus identify and interact with one another. But an effective signal may be prohibitively expensive: if the cost of participation is too small, freeriders may send the signal and...

Previous work has found that in social dilemmas, the selfish always free-ride, while others will cooperate if they expect their peers to do so as well. Outcomes may thus depend on conditional cooperators� beliefs about the number of selfish types. An early round of the game may be played...

When person A takes an action that can be interpreted as �making an offer� to person B and B �rejects the offer,� then A may �lose face.� This loss of face (LoF) and consequent disutility will occur only if these actions are common knowledge to A and B. While under some circumstances...

Real-world policymakers want to extract investors private information about a policy's likely effects by listening to "asset markets". However, this brings the risk that investors will profitably "manipulate" prices to steer policy. We model the interaction between a policymaker and an informed...

This essay broadly considers gifts, giving and gift economies, modern and pre-modern, from a mainstream (and behavioural) economics perspective.

I run a series of laboratory experiments to estimate and describe the extent to which an individual�s charitable donation to one cause displaces his or her giving to another cause. The experiments also investigate motivations for giving, including the simple warm-glow and public-goods models,...

Consumers have shown willingness to pay a premium for products labeled as "Fair Trade" and to prefer retailers that are seen as more generous to their suppliers and employees. We define a fair trade product as a bundle of a consumption good and a donation. An altruistic consumer will only choose...

Several papers have documented that when subjects play with standard laboratory �endowments� they make less self-interested choices then when they use money they have either earned through a laboratory task or brought from outside the lab. In the context of a charitable giving experiment we...

Abstract Previous experimental and observational work suggests that people act more generously when they are observed and observe others in social settings. But the explanation for this is unclear. An individual may want to send a signal of her generosity in order to improve her own reputation....