Social norms can help to foster cooperation and to overcome the free-rider problem in private provision of public goods. This paper focuses on the enforcement of social norms by a self-introduced punishment and reward scheme. We analyse if subjects achieve to implement a norm-enforcement...

Social norms can help to foster cooperation and to overcome the free-rider problem in private provision of public goods. This paper focuses on the enforcement of social norms by a selfintroduced punishment and reward scheme. We analyse if subjects achieve to implement a normenforcement mechanism...

Social norms are a ubiquitous feature of social life and pervade almost every aspect of human social interaction. However, despite their importance we still have relatively little empirical knowledge about the forces that drive the formation, the maintenance and the decay of social norms. In...

Do individuals trained in law enforcement punish or reward differently from typical student subjects? We analyze norm enforcement behavior of newly appointed police commissioners in both a Voluntary Contribution Mechanism game and a Common Pool Resource game. Our experimental design includes...

We present experimental evidence for decision settings where public good providers compete for endogenous donations offered by outside donors. Donors receive benefits from public good provision but cannot provide the good themselves. The performance of three competition mechanisms is examined in...

We study the behavior of individuals coming from different geographic regions of Italy, in a same public good game. We confirm previous findings according to which, faced with the same incentives and experimental conditions, Southern citizens exhibit a lower propensity to cooperate than Northern...

This study presents experimental evidence on the effectiveness of alternative institutional arrangements designed to allow providers of public good services to be subsidized by non-providers. The decision setting is a repeated linear public good game with two groups, insiders and outsiders....

We contrast and compare three ways of predicting efficiency in a forced contribution threshold public good game. The three alternatives are based on ordinal potential, quantal response and impulse balance theory. We report an experiment designed to test the respective predictions and find that...

The burgeoning literature on the use of sanctions to support public goods provision has largely neglected the use of formal or centralized sanctions. We let subjects playing a linear public goods game vote on the parameters of a formal sanction scheme capable both of resolving and of...