This paper examines the role of other-regarding and time preferences for cooperation in the field. We study the preferences of fishermen whose main, and often only, source of income stems from using a common pool resource (CPR). The exploitation of a CPR involves a negative interpersonal and...

This paper investigates the effectiveness of two instruments designed to defer termination in the centipede game: an insurance against termination by the opponent, and an option to offer the opponent a bonus for not terminating the game. The rational prediction in both cases is passing until...

A substantial number of people exhibit social preferences, which means they are not solely motivated by material self-interest but also care positively or negatively for the material payoffs of relevant reference agents. We show empirically that economists fail to understand fundamental economic...

This paper proposes a simple two-stage mechanism to establish positive contributions to public goods in the absence of powerful institutions to provide the public good and to sanction free-riders. In this mechanism players commit to the public good by paying a deposit prior to the contribution...

This paper explicitly introduces norms in games, assuming that they shape (some) players’ utility and beliefs. People feel badly when they deviate from a binding norm, and the less other players deviate, the more badly they feel. Further, people anger at transgressors and get pleasure from...

When markets are incomplete, the competitive equilibria considered so far are not constrained Pareto-efficient, production efficiency breaks down and shareholders no longer agree on the objective function of the firm. We first show by way of an example that these inefficiencies originate in the...

There is strong evidence that people exploit their bargaining power in competitive markets but not in bilateral bargaining situations. There is also strong evidence that people exploit free-riding opportunities in voluntary cooperation games. Yet, when they are given the opportunity to punish...

It is still an open question when groups perform better than individuals in intellectual tasks. We report that in a company takeover experiment, groups placed better bids than individuals and substantially reduced the winner’s curse. This improvement was mostly due to peer pressure over the...

Schott et al. (2007) have shown that the “tragedy of the commons” can be overcome when individuals share their output equally in groups of optimal size and there is no communication. In this paper we investigate the impact of introducing communication groups that may or may not be linked to...