This paper deals with what we believe is an important component of human well being, which has been traditionally neglected by economic discourse: the individual’s perception of his/her life’s overall security. Our aim is to study this feature within the framework of the economics...

In this work we use data on response times from a public good experiment to test the hypothesis that cooperation is instinctive, under the assumption that the longer the time of the decision, the less instinctive the choice. Results seem to support the hypothesis that cooperation is instinctive,...

The so-called problem of the spontaneous cooperation has been substantially resolved through a mix of biology and economics. All the elements of the solution had been discovered by 1980s, yet they went somehow unnoticed. This "old" solution is the subject of this review. Its most relevant...

Our experiment aims at studying the impact of two types of relational goods on the voluntary contributions to the production of a public good, i.e. acquaintance among the contributors and having performed a common work before the experiment. We implement two treatments with 128 participants from...

According to commonsense wisdom, under proportionality a small centrist party enjoys an excess of power with reference to its share of seats (or votes) due to the possibility of blackmailing the larger ones. This hypothesis has been challenged on a theoretical ground, with some empirical...

Sometimes the leaders of ethnic minority groups behave in a way that may promote xenophobia. A simple two-subject model is used to find out when this behaviour is rational. The conditions are briefly discussed with reference to the Italian case. An appendix illustrates the definition of...

The experiment presented in this paper has two aims, both methodological. First, we want to check for the role of what we may call (after Carpenter et al., 2006) the they came to play effect. Second, we want to test whether the lab outcomes are confirmed by a questionnaire on a hypothetical...

It is argued that the propensity to cooperate may be negatively affected by competition. Experimental evidence support this hypothesis. In a set of three experiments in which different degrees of competition characterize the markets, participants reduce their contributions to a public project as...

The paper illustrates a simple empirical rule to choose the best electoral system for a Parliament.