We construct a simple three person trust game with one trustor and two trustees. The trustorhas the possibility to either trust both trustees or none, while the trustees make their decisionseither sequentially or simultaneously, depending on the treatment. When trustees play...

Charness et al. (2007b) have shown that group membership has a strong effect on individualdecisions in strategic games when group membership is salient through payoff commonality.In this comment I show that their findings also apply to non-strategic decisions, even when nooutgroup exists, and I...

In public good provision, privileged groups enjoy the advantage that some of its membersfind it optimal to supply a positive amount of the public good. However, their inherentasymmetric nature may make the enforcement of cooperative behavior through informalsanctioning harder to accomplish...

This article examines the nature of human behavior in a nested socialdilemma referred to as the Spillover Game. Players are divided into twogroups with positive production interdependencies. Based on theoreticallyderived opportunistic, local, and global optima, our experimental...

In this paper, we study a voluntary contribution mechanism withone-way communication. The relevance of one person’s words is assessedby assigning exogeniously the role of the ‘communicator’ to onegroup member. Contrary to the view that the mutual exchange ofpromises is necessary for the...

In a punishment experiment, we separate the demand for punishmentin general from a possible demand to conduct punishmentpersonally. Subjects experience an unfair split of their earnings froma real effort task and have to decide on the punishment of the personwho determines the distribution....

Based on an experimental analysis of a simple monetary economy we argue that a monetary system is more stable than one would expect from individual rationality. Weshow that positive reciprocity stabilizes the monetary system, provided everyparticipant considers accepting money as a reasonable...