Many water allocation agreements in transboundary river basins are inherently unstable. Due to stochastic river flow, agreements may be broken in case of drought. The objective of this paper is to analyze whether water allocation agreements can be self-enforcing, or sustainable. We do so using...

This paper provides a new way to identify conditional cooperation in a real-time version of the standard voluntary contribution mechanism. We define contribution cycles as the number of contributors a player waits for before committing to a further contribution, and use a permutation test on...

Real world players often increase their payoÞs by voluntarily committing to play a .xed strategy, prior to the start of a strategic game. In fact, the players may further bene.t from commitments that are conditional on the commitments of others. This paper proposes a model of conditional...

We study how punishment influences conditional cooperation. We ask two questions: 1) how does conditional cooperation change if a subject can be punished and 2) how does conditional cooperation change if a subject has the power to punish others. In particular, we disentangle the decision to be a...