We investigate the effect of a donation incentive tied to contributions to a public good when group members can decide on the size of the donation to be made. An up to 20 % donation of the public good was implemented either exogenously or endogenously by group members. In the Vote treatment,...

This paper proposes a simple two-stage mechanism to establish positive contributions to public goods in the absence of powerful institutions to provide the public good and to sanction free-riders. In this mechanism players commit to the public good by paying a deposit prior to the contribution...

In this paper we test the effect of descriptive features on initial strategic behavior in normal form games, where descriptive are all those features that can be modified without altering the (Nash) equilibrium structure of a game. We observe that our experimental subjects behave according to...