Providing public goods is hard, because providers are best off free-riding. Is it even harder if one group's public good is a public bad for another group or, conversely, gives the latter a windfall profit? We experimentally study public goods provision embedded in a social context and find that...

We study the effect of voting when insiders' public goods provision may affect passive outsiders. Without voting insiders' contributions do not differ, regardless of whether outsiders are positively or negatively affected or even unaffected. Voting on the recommended contribution level enhances...

Cartels are inherently instable. Each cartelist is best off if it breaks the cartel, while the remaining firms remain loyal. If firms interact only once, if products are homogenous, if firms compete in price, and if marginal cost is constant, theory even predicts that strategic interaction...

Sanctions are often so weak that a money maximizing individual would not be deterred. In this paper I show that they may nonetheless serve a forward looking purpose if sufficiently many individuals are averse against advantageous inequity. Using the Fehr/Schmidt model (QJE 1999) I define three...

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...

For decades, experimental economics has been very interested in behavior that could be characterized as practicing solidarity (although the term is rarely used). Solidarity is a key concept in Catholic Social Teaching. This paper builds a bridge between these two endeavors that, thus far, had...

Public good contribution in experiments may at least partially be driven by the social demand to contribute that is implicit in them. We consider a questionnaire measure and build a behavioral measure of sensitivity to social pressure based on paired dictator and money burning games; we find...