Many charities report donations using categories. We question whether such category reporting increases donations in a signalling game where a donor is either generous or not generous. Conditions are derived under which category reporting will increase giving or decrease giving. Category...

In this paper we analyse the effect that naïve agents (those who take behavior at 'face value') have on the nature of social norms. After reviewing the use of signalling models to model conformity, we argue in favour of modelling naïve inferences in tandem with standard Bayes rational...

An individual's contribution to a public good may be seen by others as a signal of attributes such as generosity or wealth. An individual may, therefore, choose their contribution so as to send an appropriate signal to others. In this paper we question how the inferences made by others will...

Reciprocity can be a powerful motivation for human behaviour. Scholars argue that it is relevant in the context of private provision of public goods. We examine whether reciprocity can resolve the associated coordination problem. The interaction of reciprocity with cost-sharing is critical....

Institutions for co-financing agreements often exist to encourage public good investment. Can such frameworks deliver maximal investment when agents are motivated by reciprocity? We demonstrate that indeed they can, but not in the way one might expect. If maximal investment is impossible in the...

We analyze a coordination game characterised by varying degrees of conflict of interest, incentive to coordinate and information asymmetry. The primary objective is to question whether endogenous leadership better enables coordination. A secondary objective is to question whether preference and...

We investigate, experimentally, the effects of leadership in a four player weak-link game. A weak-link game is a coordination game with multiple Pareto-ranked Nash equilibria. Because the more efficient equilibria involve a degree of strategic uncertainty groups typically find it difficult to...

We investigate experimentally whether the endowment of potential contributors changes the success rate of providing threshold public goods. We find a U shaped relationship in which the success rate is relatively high when the endowment is either relatively small or large. We also find an...

We consider a simple model that combines elements of search and social learning. Acting in sequence, and observing the action adopted by a previous agent, agents must search for an action. We explore why agent heterogeneity may increase expected payoffs and demonstrate that social learning may...

We consider a dynamic model of conformity that permits both a conformist and non-conformist equilibrium. We provide conditions under which conformity can 'invade' a population. More precisely, starting from a non-conformist equilibrium, we show that the conformity of an arbitrarily small...