Recent work in experimental economics on the effectiveness of rewards and punishments for promoting cooperation mainly examines decentralized incentive systems where all group members can reward and/or punish one another. Many self-organizing groups and societies, however, concentrate the power...

In this paper, we investigate whether dynamic incentive schemes lead to a ratchet effect in a social dilemma. We test whether subjects strategically restrict their contribution levels at the beginning of a cumulative public goods game in order to avoid high obligations in the future and how this...

Experimental studies have modeled individual funding of social projects as contributions to a threshold public good. We examine donors' behavior when they face multiple threshold public goods and the possibility of coordinating their contributions via an intermediary. Employing the experimental...