Delinquents are embedded in a network of relationships. Social ties among delinquents are modeled by means of a graph where delinquents compete for a booty and benefit from local interactions with their neighbors. Each delinquent decides in a non-cooperative way how much delinquency effort he...

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 examines how religious festivals and the degree of religiosity affect cooperation and altruistic punishment by using public goods experiments. We conducted the experiments in Turkey at different points in time; one on the most religious day during Ramadan (the Night of...

Existing experimental research on behavior in weakest-link games shows overwhelmingly the inability of people to coordinate on the efficient equilibrium, especially in larger groups. We hypothesize that people are able to coordinate on efficient outcomes, provided they have sufficient freedom to...

We provide a direct test of the role of social preferences in voluntary cooperation. We elicit individuals' cooperation preference in one experiment and make a point prediction about the contribution to a repeated public good. This allows for a novel test as to whether there are types of players...

We explore the influence of social norms on behavior. To do so, we introduce a method for identifying norms, based on the property that social norms reflect social consensus regarding the appropriateness of different possible behaviors. We demonstrate that the norms we elicit, along with a...

The paper presents a new meta data set covering 13 experiments on the social learning games by Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer, and Welch (1992). The large amount of data makes it possible to estimate the empirically optimal action for a large variety of decision situations and ask about the economic...

We model an environment in which individuals prefer to be in a space in which their rank is higher, be it a social space, a geographical space, a work environment, or any other comparison sphere which we refer to in this paper, and without loss of generality, as a region. When the individuals...

In-work benefits are becoming an increasingly relevant labour market policy, gradually expanding in scope and geographical coverage. This paper investigates the equilibrium impact of in-work benefits and contrasts it with the traditional partial equilibrium analysis. We find under which...

We study optimal tax and educational policies in a dynamic private information economy, in which ex-ante heterogeneous individuals make an educational investment early in their life and face a stochastic wage distribution. We characterize labor and education wedges in this setting analytically...