When individuals trade with strangers, there is a temptation to renege on contracts. In the absence of repeated interaction or exogenous enforcement mechanisms, this problem can impede valuable exchange. Historically, individuals have solved this problem by forming institutions that sustain...

Tournaments consisting of iterative matches are a common mechanism for determining how to allocate a prize. While participants are focused on their own outcomes, tournament organizers often have objectives such as maximizing the total investment or effort by the participants over the course of...

Donations and volunteerism can be conceived as market transactions with zero explicit price. However, evidence suggests people may not view zero as just another price when it comes to pro-­social behavior. Thus, while markets might be expected to increase the supply of assets available to those...

The history of the world is strewn with the remains of societies whose institutions failed to adapt to ecological change, but the determinants of institutional fragility are difficult to identify in the historical record. We report a laboratory experiment that explores the impact of an exogenous...

Donations and volunteerism can be conceived as market transactions with a zero explicit price. However, evidence suggests people may not view zero as just another price when it comes to pro-social behavior. Thus, while markets might be expected to increase the supply of assets available to those...

Many people die while waiting for organ transplants even though the number of usable organs is far larger than the number needed for transplant. Governments have devised many policies aimed at increasing available transplant organs with variable success. However, with few exceptions, policy...

We study a novel, repeated common pool resource game in which current resource stocks depend on resource extraction in previous periods. Our model shows that for a sufficiently high regrowth rate, there is no commons dilemma: the resource will be preserved indefinitely in equilibrium. Lower...

When individuals trade with strangers, there is a temptation to renege on contracts. In the absence of repeated interaction or exogenous enforcement mechanisms, this problem can impede valuable exchange. Historically, individuals have solved this problem by forming institutions that sustain...

Ethnic and kinship ties have long been viewed as potential catalysts for favoritism, and hence corruption. In experiments conducted in three countries, we recruit siblings, co-ethnics and strangers and vary the relationship(s) between the players of a game to observe how kin and ethnic ties...

While economists recognize the important role of formal institutions in the promotion of trade, there is increasing agreement that institutions are typically endogenous to culture, making it difficult to disentangle their separate contributions. Lab experiments that assign institutions...