Purpose – The paper emphasises the general relevance of social norms and social associations for cooperative behaviour in less or non-social economic contexts, focusing in particular on economic laboratory experiments, and to illustrate the underlying psychological driving forces....

This paper considers the endogenous formation of an institution to provide a public good. If the institution governs only its members, players have an incentive to free ride on the institution formation of others and the social dilemma is simply shifted to a higher level. Addressing this...