Until recently, theorists considering the evolution of human cooperation have paid little attention to institutional punishment, a defining feature of large-scale human societies. Compared to individually-administered punishment, institutional punishment offers a unique potential advantage: the...

Until recently, theorists considering the evolution of human cooperation have paid little attention to institutional punishment, a defining feature of large-scale human societies. Compared to individually administered punishment, institutional punishment offers a unique potential advantage: the...

A profit-maximizing auctioneer can provide a public good to at most one of a number of groups of agents. The groups may have non-empty intersections. Each group member has a private value for the good being provided to each group, which is not commonly known. We investigate an auction mechanism...

Understanding whether the size of the interacting group has an effect on cooperative behavior has been a major topic of debate since the seminal works on cooperation in the 1960s. Half a century later, scholars have yet to reach a consensus, with some arguing that cooperation is harder in larger...

In a local interaction model agents situated on a circle play bilateral prisoners' dilemmas with their immediate neighbors and have three possible strategies: cooperate in all interactions (altruistic), defect in all interactions (egoistic), or cooperate with one immediate neighbor with...

How can we maximize the common good? This is a central organizing question of public policy design, across political parties and ideologies. The answer typically involves the provisioning of public goods such as fresh air, national defense, and knowledge. Public goods are costly to produce but...

We study conditional cooperation based on a sequential two-person linear public good game in which a trusting first contributor can be exploited by a second contributor. After playing this game the first contributor is allowed to punish the second contributor. The consequences of sanctioning...

Social dilemmas are central to human society. Depletion of natural resources, climate protection, security of energy supply, and workplace collaborations are all examples of social dilemmas. Since cooperative behaviour in a social dilemma is individually costly, Nash equilibrium predicts that...