Though risk attitude is central to economics and finance, relatively little is known about how it is formed and how it changes over time. Based on US data from a dedicated psycho-social module on lifestyle of the 2010 Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we provide new evidence on the correlation...

Is culture an important variable to explain whether groups can successfully provide public goods? A wealth of empirical evidence on both industrialized and developing countries shows that cooperation levels decrease in the presence of ethnic divisions. Although several laboratory works deal with...

In this paper, we show that incorporating the relational dimension into an otherwise standard OLG model and focusing on dynamic leisure externalities leads to dramatically different predictions. Here we show that when the old perceive private and relational consumption as substitutable goods, a...

Social norms are ubiquitous in human life. Their role is essential in allowing cooperation to prevail, despite the presence of incentives to free ride. As far as norm enforcement devices are concerned, it would be impossible to have widespread social norms if second parties only enforced them....

Experimental evidence indicates that free riders and strongly reciprocal papers coexist in the public goods game framework. By means of an evolutionary analysis, we provide an endogenization of this behavioral regularity.

An oft-cited and robust result from Public Goods Game experiments is that, when subjects start playing, the aggregate level of contributions is significantly different from zero. At the same time, a sizeable proportion of players free ride from the outset. Behavioural economics has persuasively...

In real life, punishment is often implemented only insofar as punishers are entitled to punish and punishees deserve to be punished. We provide an experimental test for this principle of legitimacy in the framework of a public goods game, by comparing it with a classic (unrestricted) punishment...

We experimentally investigate cooperation within a finitely repeated public goods game framework where peer punishment is possible but, unlike previous work, in each round access to sanctioning power is exclusively awarded to the group’s top contributor. We compare this mechanism with a...