Previous research indicates that risky and uncertain marginal returns from the public good significantly lower contributions. This paper presents experimental results illustrating that the effects of risk and uncertainty depend on the employed parameterization. Specifically, if the value of the...

In Binary Threshold Public Good (BTPG) games players contribute or not to the production of a public good which is produced if and only if there are "enough" contributors. There is a plethora of equilibria in BTPG games. We experimentally test general theoretical attributes of equilibria and...

Consider a mechanism for the binary public good provision problem that is dominant strategy incentive compatible (DSIC), ex-post individually rational (EPIR), and ex-post budget balanced (EPBB). Suppose this mechanism has the additional property that the utility from participating in the...

In a semi-aggregative representation of a game, the payoff of a player depends on a player's own strategy and on a personalized aggregate of all players' strategies. Suppose that each player has a conjecture about the reaction of the personalized aggregate to a change in the player's own...

For several years, an increasing number of firms are investing in Open Source Software (OSS). While improvements in such a non-excludable public good cannot be appropriated, companies can benefit indirectly in a complementary proprietary segment. We study this incentive for investment in OSS. In...

This paper experimentally studies two simple interventions aimed at increasing public goods provision in settings in which accurate feedback about contributions is not available. The first intervention aims to exploit lying aversion by requiring subjects to send a non-verifiable ex post...

We formally explore the idea that punishment of norm-breakers may be a vehicle for the older generation to teach youngsters about social norms. We show that this signaling role provides sufficient incentives to sustain costly punishing behavior. People punish norm-breakers to pass information...

There are situations in which competitors ally to pursue a common objective. This simultaneous presence of cooperation and competition is called coopetition and we study it theoretically and experimentally in a group contest setup. More concretely, we analyze a group contest with a new sharing...

In this paper, we use an experimental setup to classify cooperation types using a sequential prisoner's dilemma and a one shot sequential public goods game. In these two games, we examine the within subject stability of cooperation preferences. Our results suggest that subjects classified as...

An often-replicated result in the experimental literature on social dilemmas is that a large share of subjects reveal conditionally cooperative preferences. Cooperation generated by this type of preferences is notoriously unstable, as individuals reduce their contributions to the public good in...