This paper experimentally investigates whether risk-averse individuals punish less if the outcome of punishment is uncertain than when it is certain. Our design includes three treatments: Baseline in which the one-shot prisoner’s dilemma game is played; Certain Punishment in which the...

From the perspective of competitors, competition may be modeled as a prisoner's dilemma. Setting the monopoly price is cooperation, undercutting is defection. Jointly, competitors are better off if both are faithful to a cartel. Individually, profit is highest if only the competitor(s) is (are)...

We use the investment game introduced by Berg, Dickhaut and McCabe (1995) to explore gender differences in trust and reciprocity. In doing so we replicate and extend the results first reported by Croson and Buchan (1999). We find that men exhibit greater trust than women do while women show much...

We experimentally investigate a finitely repeated public good game with varying partners. Within each period, participants are pairwise matched and contribute simultaneously. Participants are informed about contributions and each participant evaluates her partner's contribution. At the beginning...

If two players of a simultaneous symmetric one-shot prisoner's dilemma hold standard prefer-ences, the fact that choosing the cooperative move imposes harm on a passive outsider is imma-terial. Yet if participants hold social preferences, one might think that they are reticent to impose harm on...

This paper introduces a two-sided methodological framework for studies on cooperation based on a new game design. Presented games are continuous prisoner's dilemma games with positive and negative presentations of an identically structured decision problem. Decision makers can choose an...

This article examines the nature of human behavior in a nested social dilemma referred to as the Spillover Game. Players are divided into two groups with positive production interdependencies. Based on theoretically derived opportunistic, local, and global optima, our experimental results...

Legal realists expect prosecutors to be selfish. If they get the defendant convicted, this helps them advance their careers. If the odds of winning on the main charge are low, prosecutors have a second option. They can exploit the ambiguity of legal doctrine and charge the defendant for vaguely...

This paper examines the influence of third-party observation and third-party reward on behavior in an experimental prisoner's dilemma (PD) game. Whereas the existing literature on third-party intervention as a means to sustain social norms has dealt almost exclusively with third-party...