We investigate how burden sharing rules impact the voluntary provision of a public good which generates heterogeneous benefits to agents. We compare different rule-based contribution schemes where agents can first suggest a minimum provision level of the public good, before the smallest common...

Group membership is a powerful determinant of social behaviour in a variety of experimental games. Its effect may be channelled primarily via the beliefs of group members, or directly change their social preferences. We report an experiment with a prisoner's dilemma with multiple actions, in...

We analyze a group contest in which n groups compete to win a group-specific public good prize. Group sizes can be different and any player may value the prize differently within and across groups. Players exert costly efforts simultaneously and independently. Only the highest effort (the...

This paper starts from the observation that in public-goods group contests, group impact can in general not be additively decomposed into some sum (of functions) of individual efforts. We use a CES-impact function to identify the main channels of influence of the elasticity of substitution on...

A core element of economic theory is the assumption of stable preferences. We test this assumption in public goods games by repeatedly eliciting cooperation preferences in a fixed subject pool over a period of five months. We find that cooperation preferences are very stable at the aggregate...

Many fundraisers report donations using categories such as more than £ 1000, more than £ 10,000, etc. One naturally wonders how we should categorise donations and whether categorising raises more than simple uncategorised reporting. To answer these questions, we employ a signalling game...

Studies have shown that there are differences in cooperative behavior across countries. Furthermore, differences in the use and the reaction on the introduction of a norm enforcement mechanism have been documented in cross-cultural studies, recently. We present data which prove that stark...

We use experimental methods to study the power of leading by words. The context is a voluntary contribution mechanism with one-way communication. One group member can send a free-form text message to his fellow players. Contrary to the commonly accepted wisdom that the cooperation-enhancing...

We examine voluntary contributions in a two-stage public good experiment with ‘carryover.’ In two treatments, each subject's second-stage endowment is determined by the return from the public good in the first-stage. We manipulate payoffs across treatments such that, relative to our...