Cooperation problems are at the heart of many everyday situations. In this paper, we propose a very simple and light-handed mechanism to sustain cooperation and test its performance in a rich laboratory environment. The mechanism moderates cooperation by controlling experiences, more...

The prospect of receiving a monetary sanction for free riding has been shown to increase contributions to public goods. We ask whether the impulse to punish is unresponsive to the cost to the punisher, or whether, like other preferences, it interacts with prices to generate a conventional demand...

When subjects can make non-binding announcements of possible contributions to a public good numerically, there is no effect on average level of contributions in a public goods experiment relative to play without announcements. But a detailed analysis of this experiment shows that pre-play...

In a public goods experiment with the opportunity to vote to expel members of a group, we found that contributions rose to nearly 100% of endowments with significantly higher efficiency compared with a noexpulsion baseline. Expulsions were strictly of the lowest contributors, and there was an...

Previous experiments on public goods dilemmas have found that the opportunity to punish leads to higher contributions and reduces the free rider problem; however, a substantial amount of punishment is targeted on high contributors. In the experiment reported here, subjects are given the...

The fact that many people take it upon themselves to impose costly punishment on free riders helps to explain why collective action sometimes succeeds despite the prediction of received theory. But while individually imposed sanctions lead to higher contributions in public goods experiments,...

Broken Windows: the metaphor has changed New York and Los Angeles. Yet it is far from undisputed whether the broken windows policy was causal for reducing crime. In a series of lab experiments we show that first impressions are indeed causal for cooperativeness in three different institutional...

Does probation pay a double dividend? Society saves the cost of incarceration, and convicts preserve their liberty. But does probation also reduce the risk of recidivism? In a meta-study we show that the field evidence is inconclusive. Moreover it struggles with an identification problem: those...