This paper examines how a religious festival (Ramadan) and the degree of religiosity affect cooperation and costly punishment in a public goods experiment. We find significantly higher cooperation levels outside the festival among less religious people. This behavior is consistent with a...

We report the results of experiments designed to investigate the effects of random public revelation of individual choices on voluntary contributions to a public good. Varying the number of subjects whose contributions are made public, we find that public revelation always leads to higher...

Entry decisions in market entry games usually depend on the belief about how many others are entering the market, the belief about the own rank in a real effort task, and subjects’ risk preferences. In this paper I am able to replicate these basic results and examine two further dimensions:...

Arad and Rubinstein (2012a) have designed a novel game to study level-k reasoning experimentally. Just like them, we find that the depth of reasoning is very limited and clearly different from that in equilibrium play. We show that such behavior is even robust to repetitions; hence there is, at...

We experimentally analyse simultaneous behaviour in a contest game and a public good game, whose endowment is shared. Competition for resources (i) almost eliminates overbidding, without affecting public good contributions and (ii) almost eliminates the behavioural spillovers between the games.

We study behavior in the race game with the aim of assessing whether teams can create synergies. The race game has the advantage that the optimal strategy depends neither on beliefs about other players nor on distributional or efficiency concerns. Our results reveal that teams not only...

A stag-hunt game (with the risky and safe actions) has two pure Nash equilibria that are Pareto-rankable. The risky action leads either to the Pareto-superior equilibrium (high payoff) or to out of equilibrium (low payoff) depending on the opponent’s action. Both players may want to obtain...

We conduct a laboratory experiment and provide evidence of learning spillovers within and across equivalence classes of “structurally similar” games. These spillovers are inconsistent with existing theories of learning in games.

We apply an indirect evolutionary approach to players’ perceived prize valuations in contests. Evolution in finite populations leads to preferences that overstate the prize’s material value and induce overexpenditure. We establish an equivalence between evolutionarily stable strategies and...

The ratio of within-group to between-group fighting is shown to be unrealistically high for the collective rent seeking model when agents exert two efforts i.e. within-group and between-group efforts. The ratio is more realistic for the production and conflict model. Six economics examples...