We investigate the impact of various audit schemes on the future provision of public goods, when contributing less than the average of the group is sanctioned exogenously and the probability of an audit is unknown. We study how individuals update their beliefs about the probability of being...

In public good provision, privileged groups enjoy the advantage that some of its membersfind it optimal to supply a positive amount of the public good. However, their inherentasymmetric nature may make the enforcement of cooperative behavior through informalsanctioning harder to accomplish...

Economic and social interaction takes place between individuals with heterogeneous characteristics. We investigate experimentally the emergence and informal enforcement of different contribution norms to a public good in homogeneous and different heterogeneous groups. When punishment is not...

Being perceived as trustworthy comes with substantial economic benefits in many situations. Making other people think you are a trustworthy person may, therefore, be an important motive for charity and other forms of prosocial behavior, provided these activities work as signals of...

We devise a new experimental game by nesting a voluntary contributions mechanism in a broader spectrum of incentive schemes. With it, we study tensions between egalitarianism, equity concerns, self-interest, and the need for incentives. In a 2x2 design, subjects either vote on or exogenously...

Experimental studies of social dilemmas have shown that while the existence of a sanctioning institution improves cooperation within groups, it also has a detrimental impact on group earnings in the short run. Could the introduction of pre-play threats to punish have enough of a beneficial...

We conduct a contribution game for a real public good and show that when the contributors value the real public good highly, they increase their contributions in each round. Thus, contrary to previous literature, free riding decreases over rounds and the end-game effect is reversed

It has been shown that psychological predispositions to benefit others can motivate human cooperation and the evolution of such social preferences can be explained with kin or multi-level selection models. It has also been shown that cooperation can evolve as a costly signal of an unobservable...

We design an infrastructure experiment in Mexico to evaluate the impact of street pavement on housing values and household outcomes. We find that the provision of street pavement raises housing values by 16% and land values by 54%, according to professional appraisals. Using homeowner...

This paper studies whether prosocial values are transmitted from parents to their children. We do so through an economic experiment, in which a group of Hispanic and African American families play a standard public goods game. The experimental data presents us with a surprising result. We find...